Internal raid or nas?

[MarineCommando]

Hey all,

I'm lloking to upgrade my pc around a A8n-sli deluxe motherboard and am interested in the raid possibilitys of the board.

I had been interested in going for the premium as it has a raid 5 controller but after reading some threads on here decided it wasnt going to give me the performance i want.

I guess my setup is a lot like other peeps in that i have my C: drive as my windows partition with my games / programs installed and a d: drive with all my movies music and pcitures etc (okay pron blah blah blah ) I'm not that bothered about the c drive failing as i can reinstall with no problems but loosing the d: drive would be a disaster.

So i basically have two ideas for my upgrade. The first is to buy say 2x fast sata2 drives around the 200gb mark and stripe them for my windows / applications drive giving me xtra performance, and then buy another 2x 400 gb drives and mirror them for redundancy. The problem i forsee with this are that 4 disks is gonna cost me alot, there gonna be a lot of extra heat, and a lot of juice used up. I guess its also gonna be fairly noisy and my case is going to be tres full.

My second idea was to go for something like a 150gb raptor (or better if someone can suggest ) for windows and apps, and then buy a little NAS box and put two 400gb drives in and mirror them.

I guess i want you to pick both ideas to pieces and then i go for what evers left over!

thougths anyone?

cheers

MC

[RavenNight]

Well I've been really impressed with my RAID. I had little difficulty setting it up, but frankly its really easy if you follow the instructions carefully. Currently with my two 80gb Hitachi Deskstars I outperform premium SCSI set-ups, I'm over six times faster than the IDE drive I used to have.

[GDVS]

Currently with my two 80gb Hitachi Deskstars I outperform premium SCSI set-ups

Depends on usage, for a single user you could possibly manage it but you'd not even get close for multi user. The latency on a top end 15k SCSI drive is so much lower than that on your Deskstars it's not funny.

[RavenNight]

Well here's my HDTach:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y32/Raven49/raid.jpg

You've also got to consider that a SCSI drive of the same size would cost about £270 while my solution costs under £80. I know the SCSI would have a lower response time but frankly is that worth the £210?

Back on topic I really like the idea of the two 80gb in RAID 0 and the two 400GB mirrored and I'm definately gonna try and do the same as soon as the bank balance allows. You probably don't even need to worry about mirroring them either leave them sa they are or jbod them and you'll get just under a terabyte of storage.

[GDVS]

Well here's my HDTach:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y32/Raven49/raid.jpg

You've also got to consider that a SCSI drive of the same size would cost about £270 while my solution costs under £80. I know the SCSI would have a lower response time but frankly is that worth the £210?

That wasn't what you said though, you said it outperformed a premium SCSI setup and I pointed out that with this generation of SATA that's just not realistic. Price/performance wise though I agree with you 100%, SATA blows SCSI away on everything except raw power and for single user use the advantages SCSI has really aren't even close to being worth the money. SATA is definitely the better buy and the next generation will probably eclipse SCSI performance as well.

[MarineCommando]

Okay so what about a two hitachis striped and a separate nas box?

I really like the idea of moving it away from my pc so sa to free up resouces and reduce heat output? Witht he NAS / mirrored stuff im not worried about speed / increasing size, so much as redundancy and backup.

[Barkotron]

Okay so what about a two hitachis striped and a separate nas box?

I really like the idea of moving it away from my pc so sa to free up resouces and reduce heat output? Witht he NAS / mirrored stuff im not worried about speed / increasing size, so much as redundancy and backup.

I like this idea - stick the NAS box away in a cupboard or something, less heat & less noise sat there in your main box. I'm definitely going to look at something like this myself now you've put the idea in my head . Currently I'm using a 250GB Firewire drive for backups, but being able to stick the NAS in a box somewhere out of sight is a great plan (mate of mine was burgled recently - all his kit went )

The only real problem I have with them is that some of the consumer-level ones I've seen use bizarre proprietary filesystems underneath and just present the data via "some other means", which is an idea I'm really not comfortable with. If the NAS box goes down I want to be able to take the disks out, plug them in to a normal SATA port and get the stuff off myself without having to buy another box.

Of course, it's possible that I only looked at them a few months back, and since then they all use nice sensible NTFS or Reiser volumes or something...