To RAID or not to RAID

L

lone wolf

Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2003
Messages
705
1st the layout...
after some time reading, researching and budgeting,my HTPC is up and running. Thanks to w1retap's guidance, the HTPC is pretty much the same as his. (Thanks dude!)

At first, I had a drive in the HTPC dedicated to movies, since this is all that I'm using it for. but with my gf utilizing the 8600 GTS card to play her Sims 2 games (all of them :rolleyes:) I moved my movies to 6 500gb drives, thus making a media server.

Now the question, I already have a drive filled full of movies, and another about half full. I got to thinking, would RAID benefit me, or just adding individual drives be the best. I would not want to go back and have to rerip all of these.

Thanks for the help everyone.
 
i used to run 4x400 raid 5 in my main machine. read performance was great, but write was considerably slower than single disk operation (then again, i was using onboard intel raid...). i think in your case, i'd run a single raid1 for the data you want to backup if you deem the data "mission critical" otherwise, i'd just stick to single disks
 
RAID usually accomplishes one of two things; either faster disk access, or data redundancy. For HTPC usage, faster disk access is usually pointless. Depending on the value of your data, redundancy might be a desirable feature.

On my archival file server I run RAID5 to help prevent a disk failure from knocking out all my high-def films. On my HTPC however, I use Windows to span a volume across multiple drives, to create a large partition that my PVR software can record my temporary content to.
 
I have 4 500 GB disks in a RAID 5 setup on my media server mostly for data protection. I just moved from the on board raid on a DFI expert to a areca 1210 pci-ex 4 port card and the difference was amazing in terms of speed.
 
Hey lone wolf. Good to see the HTPC is coming along nicely. :)

I am starting to actually consider running raid on my file server coming up here pretty soon too. My 500GB drives are full, and I need to do something about it.

Right now I have my MAIN GAMING RIG with an exact mirror of data as my FILE SERVER. They both have (2) 500GB hard drives with the same data set on them. My HTPC has the single 750GB hard drive, and some extra temp storage left over from the 250GB drive used for the OS install.

I'm thinking of moving the other two 500GB drives out of my main gaming rig, and putting them in my file server and running raid. I might even throw in a few extra 500GB hard drives since they are only about $99 a pop now.

With the HTPC, since it has the 750GB drive, I could just drag and drop the movies from my file server and put them on the HTPC, and if the HTPC hard drive dies, its no big deal because I already would have it all backed up on the server running raid. I just upgraded everything to gigabit networking, so file transfer times are no problem, even with the 15GB 1080p movies.
 
Thanks everyone for the replies, I guess that in the long run RAID will be the better way to go. Now comes the fun part, finding a decent RAID card to do the trick. I just picked up another 4 500gb drives, so now my total storage sits at ~5tb of storage. With all of this storage, I'm going to finish ripping my movies at no compression, and now looking for a good HD drive. The bad thing is that I have filled all of my drive bays with hard drives, and I am using a Supermicro 750a case!:D

Once again thanks everyone for the assistance!
 
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