Building a new PC. Wondering what RAID setup to use.

[DavidMBaker]

Have just purchased a lot of components for a new PC. They are as follows:

Asus Striker Extreme Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (FSB1066)
2x Corsair 2GB Kit (2x 1Gb) DDR2 PC2-6400 Dominator
Inno3d 8800GTX 768MB Overclocked 590/1900 (Only one they had in stock. Would be interested to find out what is in the bundle though.)
Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer - Fatal1ty series
LG GSA-H42LBRL 18x DVD+/-R(DL)/RAM
LITEON DVD8900/DW1670 16x DVD±RW/RAM Bare Black
Windows Vista Ultimate x64 OEM Edition
6x Western Digital WD2500KS 250GB SATAII 16MB Cache Hard Drives
Sony 3.5" Floppy Drive (Almost forgot this)
Antec P180 Black Super Midi Tower
Coolermaster eXtreme Power 650W PSU (may swap for more powerful PSU in exsisting PC)
Some Silver Thermal Paste (non branded)
Hauppauge Wintv HVR4000 Quad Tuner Card (not sure if there will be room for this now I've had another look at board layout. Can find it a good home easily though)

What I am interested in knowing though is if it is worth running the HDDs in Raid 0 or if you would use Raid 5 because of the parity and hence extra protection from any HDD problems. Also downloaded all the latest drivers and bioses from the respective sites. Will be building this on Wednesday so interested to hear by then. Thanks, David.

 

[rammedstein]

go for raid 1+0 if you can, raid 5 is rumored to be pitifully slow compared to raid 0 or 1, if you don't care about data integrity/security go raid 0 (by data security i mean is it stable and secure/viable option)

 

[proof]

His idea was good but instead of RAID 10 as he suggested, go for RAID 0+1. The difference between 10 and 01 is that RAID 10 is a stripe of mirrors and 01 is a mirror of stripes. They will offer about the same data protection but RAID 01 will give you a slightly better performance.

 

[cb62fcni]

You'll need two more raptors for 0+1.

 

[DavidMBaker]

Mainly I expect the new PC will be used for gaming. It will occasionally get use by my brother for work for his university course and possibly by me for work too. However the old PC is moving into my room and the one I presently use is going to my mum. Hence I guess as long as I back things up regularly and keep more than one copy of any files, (probably copying them onto the other PCs on the network and to my webspace as well as hard copies and optical copies,) then I don't know how important data protection is. I have got sick of having to reinstall OSs every 3 or 4 months in the past though. Hence why I was thinking of running it in a format where the data is protected and recoverable.

Not really got any experience of RAID other than in Raid 0. I know whenever I've tried that I have ended up having problems. However that seemed to be due to a problem with a previous board and a particular brand of SATA hard disk drives.

Other than gaming I guess the PC is also likely to be used for viewing videos and possibly high definition content. Might also be used for video editing at some point as have some old tapes I need to sort out.

Also when using stripping what size would you recommend making the strips. As I said not really got much experience of this. Thanks for all your help, David.

P.S. Can 0+1 (or 1+0) work with six discs. Also is it more benefitial to run two seperate arrays perhaps. One with the OS on and another with the games. Would they be better running under different types of setup.

Once again thanks for any help.

 

[DavidMBaker]

On a side issue. I guess I should really get a new monitor too. Looking around I expect this might be a good option. Anyone have any experiences of it. Also means could connect in the 360 and play in high definition.

http://benq.co.uk/products/LCD/?product=636

Also looking at my spec list have I forgotten anything major. Really want to be able to build on Wednesday. Knowing what I've been like in the past though might well have overlooked something. Tend to have to pop down the local PC shop. Should know exactly what I need by now though as have built up PCs for me and my bro for quite a few years.