what to look for in a raid drive

[xr4man]

ok, i thought i knew a little somthin' somethin' about raid, but now i'm reading about TLER and CCTL and stuff like that. i'm seeing stuff about those things being turned on and off and it's getting confusing to me.

so what should i look for in drives that i plan on raiding together?

[Airbozo]

ok, i thought i knew a little somthin' somethin' about raid, but now i'm reading about TLER and CCTL and stuff like that. i'm seeing stuff about those things being turned on and off and it's getting confusing to me.

so what should i look for in drives that i plan on raiding together?

It depends.

If you are building a rock solid departmental server which requires minimal down time and ultimate performance, never use the consumer grade drives.

If it is a non-critical server, then don't worry too much about it. Just make sure all of your drives are the same or similar.

[xr4man]

ok

it's going into an internet radio server for a friend.

i wanted to do a raid 5 , but i'm starting to think that just raid 0 with an external drive for backup should be fine.

[Fuganater]

RAID 5 will give you better performance.

[xr4man]

yeah that is true. i think that and the ability to have a drive failure was why i wanted to go with raid 5 in the first place.

[Airbozo]

If you have the drives, I would do a raid 5, assuming the controller supports it. I would still do backups though. (but then again I am old school and have redundant backups of every critical piece of my data on HDD's, Tape and dvd's).

[mDust]

RAID 5 will give you better performance.

Actually, RAID 5 has to write extra parity data whereas RAID 0 does not. If you had 3 drives in RAID 0 and 3 identical drives in RAID 5, the 0 array would perform better. RAID 0 should not be used for anything critical as it has no fault tolerance or means of data recovery. If one drive dies, the array is broken and all data is gone. The RAID 5, which does perform much better than a single drive, but not as well as a 0, can survive a single drive failure. I've heard of cases where identical drives that had never been powered on before being put in an array started failing in short succession since they wore identically over many years of use...just something to take into consideration. No RAID array (except maybe a stupidly large RAID 1) is invulnerable and backups should still be performed.

[Fuganater]

If your data means anything to you and it is accessed alot then you should be using RAID 5.

[xr4man]

ok, so, would some caviar blues be ok for a raid 5 or should i tell him to bite the bullet and shell out for caviar blacks?

of course i think i already know the answer.

[Airbozo]

BTW: THIS site is where I send everyone for information on how the different raid levels work.