Well I want to use RAID 5 with my new 2k computer build as I heard it is the best RAID compared to the others. With RAID 5 you get both the speed and reliability. In Raid 0 you get the speed but you can lose data quickly. In Raid 1, you gain the reliability but you lose half your space(and lose speed i think?).

I was thinking about putting 3 of these wd 640gb hardrives together in raid 5. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136218

But I heard you need a controller(wtf?) to use raid 5...is that true?

What else do I need to know?

I also read somewhere that raid 5 isn't really praticial for consumers and if it would be better to use Raid 0+1 or something like that.

Anyone know raid here? I need help lol. I thought most motherboards come raid equipped? and if it matters i am thinking about doing this mobo http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813136042

You can use a on board RAID controller, but which board is it? Thats the DFI search page on Newegg.

there we go fixed.

Why do you want RAID? What are you hoping to gain with RAID? Yes RAID 5 will offer more throughput than a single drive but will have worse access times for instance. RAID 5 is mostly used for data redundancy so the failure of 1 drive will wipe out your data. If this is just a desktop PC you might want to do something different even if you do store valuable data on this system.

In my system I use a single drive to boot and load apps, and I also have a RAID 5 array for my important data. I also have a server with much more space on it but thats another story.

If this is for a personal computer, I would just ditch the raid setup, and get one Velociraptor and one huge 7200 rpm sata drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] lociraptor

Put the operating system and programs on the velociraptor hard drive, and throw files such as pictures and music on the other hard drive. Less complicated and easier to manage in my opinion.

Like rozar mentioned, you need to know precisely this:

Why you want RAID 5, or anything for that matter.

Is it just because you heard that it's "teh shiznit"?! In that case, google RAID 5, read up on it, understand what it gives you, and ask yourself if you need it. Also would be good to google pros / cons of it, or some such stuff.

Read up on why it exists and where it is most used.

And I think you will answer your own question.

I keep saying this to people like you - it's probably not a good idea to get technology you don't understand. Educate yourself first / get the technology second.

Edit:

Here's the thing, in case I didn't make myself clear. I'm not slamming you.

But any system planning / design should start at the problem, and end at the solution.

As in - figure out what you need. Do you need storage? Do you need fast storage? Do you need large storage? Do you need redundant storage? Do you need storage back up? What use pattern do you anticipate?

The answers to these questions will determine the solution. There are various products out there designed to address these various needs, it's a matter of matching the best one for your specific need.

unless you need uninterrupted protection from hardware failure, then you really don't need to go with raid. just go with single drives, and a good backup. period.

That DFI board will handle RAID 5. But what the others have said is pretty much true.

I use a raid 5 setup with 4 500 gig Seagates, in my file server/storage box. I store stuff here I do not want to lose, documents, movies, pics, DVD and CD images, that kind of stuff. I also keep a spare HD on hand in case I lose a HD in my array and need to pop in a spare and then I replace my spare immediately so I am ready in case it happens again.

My main PC uses a single 250 gig HD. However my next PC will probably use 2 250 gig Seagates in RAID 0 for a nice speed increase. RAID 0 is fast, but if you lose a HD your boned, thats why all the important stuff goes on the server.

Yeah like I said Im a noob and not sure if I fully understand raid 5. From what I understand, I want RAID 5 because you can redundancy while retaining disk space(maybe a slight boost in performance? than a performance of a regular hardrive; not sure about this though)

Lets look at RAID 0. RAID 0 splits data accross 2 disks significantly increasing the performance of the hardrives rather than having them as separate drives. However, the downside to this, is that you get NO data redundnacy.

Now lets look at RAID 1. RAID 1 takes the data and makes a carbon copy by mirroring the data. While this is good because you get the reliability warranty, you lose half the disk space. It is also costly if you want reliability and want the disk space.

Now lets look at RAID 5. RAID 5 uses 3 or more hardrives and distributes parity data accross all of the hardrives. This way you can lose any hardrive and still have data redundancy. Because contrasing from RAID 1, you seem to get MUCH MORE space. It seems to be a much more cost effieicent way of having that reliable redundancy. You also get the performance of the RAID 0 as well. The read performance of RAID 5 almost matches RAID 0. It is much more cost effieceint that RAID 1 as you only lost like 25% rather than 50% of the data.

So basically RAID 5 is the best of both worlds right? RAID 5 combines the peformance of RAID 0 while retaining the redundancy of RAID 1?

You see this is the reason why I want RAID 5. In this day and age of computers, hardrives die all the time. I don't want to be constantly worrying about backing up data because I won't know when a hardrive will die. I would rather not have to worry about that. With RAID 5, as long as 2 drives don't die at the same time(extremely unlikely), I will have 99% redundacy and never have to resort to backup methods.

Sorry for not being exactly clear in my first post...but from what I understand(although I may be wrong on my research) this is what I want. What else do I need to know. Is my information correct?

Without RAID 5 (or RAID 1 I guess) you always have a chance of losing your data, and I never want that to happen ever again. I've had bad experiences with that.

Anyhow, thanks!

As a guess, if you need to ask the question, you don't need raid.

There is generally no real world(vs. synthetic transfer rate benchmarks) performance advantage to raid of any kind.
Go to www.storagereview.com at this link: http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki- [...] iveVsRaid0
There are some specific applications that will benefit, but
gaming is not one of them. Even if you have an application which reads one input file sequentially, and writes
it out, you will perform about as well by putting the input on one drive, and the output on the other.

The value of raid-1 for protecting data is that you can recover from a hard drive failure quickly.
It is for servers that can't afford any down time.
Recovery from a hard drive failure is just moments.
Fortunately hard drives do not fail often.
Raid-1 does not protect you from other types of losses such as viruses,
software errors, operator error, or fire...etc.
For that, you need EXTERNAL backup.
If you have external backup, and can afford some recovery time, then you don't need raid-1.

"What is a z-j?"

"If you have to ask, big man, you can't afford it..."

What geofelt said.

PS. Google is a powerful tool. Wikipedia - or wherever else you got the definitions from - not so much. It's even incorrect at times...

I don't understand why people are so damn negative about raid, I'm thinking about getting myself raid5 array for my next build later this summer. The reasons are pretty much the same as moomoopro's, extra speed and data redundancy without too much wasted space.
And I was eyeing the exact same HDDs as well. Those are 2 platter drives and are pretty fast just by themselves, put 3 or 4 of them in RAID5 and you got yourself a winner. and not too expensive.

but yeah, some mobo chipsets will usually support raid levels 1, 0, 1+0 and 5. Depends on the southbrigde, intels ICH9R where R stands for raid support, can handle them nicely.
You'll get better options and slightly better performance with dedicated raid controller PCI(-e) cards though

according to wikipedia you'll get nearly the same read performance with raid5 as in raid0 array with same number of drives, write performance isn't as good though. Available size is (N-1)*Smin, where N is the number of drives in the array and Smin is the size of the smallest drive.

If you can afford it, do it. If you store vast amounts of data (specifically media servers) then its really your only option. I’m currently blowing out a 1.5 TB raid 1 and I need redundancy so I’m looking at 4 x 750 gig sata drives for raid 5 (2.1ish TB in the end). I even tried a 1 TB WD External USB drive for backups but it gets blown out. Its a completely viable option if you want *more* data protection and money isn’t much of an issue. There’s good reasons why servers use raid, in the past 15 years I can’t tell you the number of times I have had my career saved by raid when a drive pops. Not one disaster yet! But it you are just talking about less then 500 gigs of data, just buy a 500 gig drive and a 500gig USB drive that you connect just to back up the HD on occasion.

I don't really "get" RAID in a PC anymore. What good is having your data backed up on a 2nd drive if something happens to your PC ? You can't access your data if applying the latest service pack fudged your box. RAID on an NAS is another story. If my machine goes south for whatever reason, I can access the NAS from any other box on the network. In an NAS, fewer parts means fewer things to go wrong.

RAID also has some sophistication that, if you are asking the questions you are, it might not be a good idea. Infrant's (now Netgear) RAID-X technology is much simpler from an administration standpoint. A drive fails, you pop in a new one and it auto rebuilds and doesn't care if the replacement is the same size.

I used to build SCSI based RAID boxes but now I just build single drive systems with fast drives and store all office and personal data files on our 9 box SOHO network on an Infrant (Netgear) NV+. Of course the NAS is in turn backed up and, short of a fire or terrorist attack, I can recover any file in seconds. Recovery from a fire would take me an hour or so.