[SOLVED] Help with RAID 10 setup

Feb 14, 2022
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Hello,
I have searched for a while now but I haven't found any suitable answers to my question so I decided to post it here.

And my situation is as follows:
  • I have 3x3TB empty drives and 1x2TB drive with data on it.
  • I have Windows 10 machine.
  • My motherboard doesn't support hardware RAID.
  • Said RAID will serve me as a general purpose local storage (games, photos, document etc.).
I want to make RAID 10 (for speed and disk failure redundancy) out of HDD drives I have. And my questions are:
  1. Is it possible to do it like this:
    1. Make RAID 0 (striping) out of 2 3TB drives.
    2. Copy my data from 2TB drive to that RAID. (Side question: what is the best solution to copying big amounts of data (1.6 TB)? Maybe Clonezilla?)
    3. Format 2TB drive and make another RAID 0 with the remaining 3TB drive.
    4. Join both RAID 0s into RAID 1 (mirror).
    5. The result is a 4TB RAID 10 with the speed of ~2x the speed of a single drive that also contains my previous data.
  2. Is it possible both on hardware RAID and a software one? If on both which one should I chose?
  3. If this is not possible... let's say i buy another 3TB drive. Should I also buy an PCIe hardware controller? What would be the performance gain in comparison to software RAID?
  4. If hardware RAID is significantly better then could you recommend a tutorial on how to set up one?
  5. If you know a better solution than RAID to my problem of expanding a storage capacity of my PC then I would like to hear it too.
 
Solution
Well, for the average setup RAID 10 is usually considered extreme, and expensive. Raid 1 is all about uptime, it isn't really a sufficient backup. If your computer catches on fire, you still lose all your drives. Raid 0 is performance, but with the advent of lower cost SSDs, not that common to bother with spinning disks unless storage volume is a huge priority. You might also consider Raid 5 with your 3 drives. It would allow one drive to fail and you still get some of the performance improvements of RAID 0. Just remember that you really only gain performance with large contiguous files. If there is a lot of random I/O then this isn't ideal.

In your scenario, I would probably consider getting a large 2 or 4 TB 2.5" SSD to use as...

Eximo

Titan
Ambassador
Well, for the average setup RAID 10 is usually considered extreme, and expensive. Raid 1 is all about uptime, it isn't really a sufficient backup. If your computer catches on fire, you still lose all your drives. Raid 0 is performance, but with the advent of lower cost SSDs, not that common to bother with spinning disks unless storage volume is a huge priority. You might also consider Raid 5 with your 3 drives. It would allow one drive to fail and you still get some of the performance improvements of RAID 0. Just remember that you really only gain performance with large contiguous files. If there is a lot of random I/O then this isn't ideal.

In your scenario, I would probably consider getting a large 2 or 4 TB 2.5" SSD to use as storage for performance. Use a 3TB drive as a backup drive that you disconnect from all systems. And if you still want 100% uptime, raid your remaining 2 3TB drives and store a live copy of everything, but you probably want to move those to another system as/or a discrete NAS.

As for moving files. I suppose a drive image is one way to do it, but then you are formatting to the same size as your drive. I would probably setup a robocopy scheduled task for a simple file backup. Been a while since I used Clonezilla, not sure what options it offers today, but if it has a differential backup mode, that would work. Macrium Reflect is another option.

Pretty sure most decent motherboards support Raid 0 and 1 setups. Windows is also capable of doing this in software mode (not ideal) Raid 5 and 10 are not super common, but I recall having support with an X58 board, that had Intel ICH10R, if I recall...maybe. Been a while.

Discrete raid cards can offer more modes and benefits, but are generally pretty expensive. And if you lose the card, your array is useless without pretty much the exact card.

Hardware raid depends a lot on the exact hardware. For decent motherboards, that just means putting the disk controller in RAID mode, it will show up as part of the boot screen, then you create an array with the attached drives. Then do whatever with it from there. Discrete cards will require similar setups, but may also require injecting a specific driver into your OS install or in Windows to just use it. Any you look at purchasing will have somewhat specific guides you would need to read through.
 
Solution

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Said RAID will serve me as a general purpose local storage (games, photos, document etc.).
For that use, I can't see a RAID 0 or 10 making any measurable impact,

Additionally - 3+3+3+2+RAID 10 = 4TB array.
11TB of original space, reduced to 4TB.

Additionally, the "speed" of that RAID 0 or 10 would be swamped by any garden variety of SATA III SSD.

Lastly, what are you doing for actual backups?


What would I do with those drives?
Put them in a NAS box, with its own dedicated RAID functionality.
QNAP or Synology.
 
Feb 14, 2022
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RAID 10 is usually considered extreme, and expensive
large 2 or 4 TB 2.5" SSD to use as storage for performance
I can get 4x3TB drives for 876 PLN and combine them into 6TB RAID 10 or get 1x2TB SSD for about the same price. Second option gives me massive speed up upgrade but I don't really need such high speed as much as I need space. I know that RAID 0 doesn't double the speed of drives it is made out of from. But for me even +50% speed would be alright because speed would only be useful when loading a game and I don't have many games that load slowly and also are frequently played by me. If game isn't too big and I want it to load quickly I put it on a my SSD. But I don't have many such games. Therefore I decided that I need RAID 10 - small speed upgrade + immunity to singe disk failures.

Pretty sure most decent motherboards support Raid 0 and 1 setups
Mine unfortunately doesn't :(.

And if you lose the card, your array is useless without pretty much the exact card.
OK so let's assume the RAID card goes down... Can it corrupt my data? And if I buy a exact same card is setting everything up again hard?

For that use, I can't see a RAID 0 or 10 making any measurable impact,
OK... So would you say that just plugging 3TB to the PC would be better? (Assuming that I use 2 drives for storage and other 2 for back up)

Additionally - 3+3+3+2+RAID 10 = 4TB array.
11TB of original space, reduced to 4TB.
I'm aware of that. But I bought 3x3TB drives so I can replace existing 2TB drive (with another 3TB drive) if fails or I run out of space in the future.

Lastly, what are you doing for actual backups?
Google drive. But only for crucial data.

What would I do with those drives?
Put them in a NAS box, with its own dedicated RAID functionality.
QNAP or Synology.
So you say that NAS box is better than PCIe RAID card?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
So you say that NAS box is better than PCIe RAID card?
Absolutely.
(Except for playing games from)

For all those other uses, pictures, video, etc, etc.
Absolutely.

Far more feature rich, accessible from any system in the house,
Hold actual backups of the house systems.

Pics and movies do NO need uber speed.
A 2 hour movie still takes 2 hours to watch, no matter what storage device it lives on.

I have a QNAP that just turned 5 years old, and has survived through 3 main PC changes.
 
Reread the UASFRet post and take it to heart.

Rethink your objectives.

If you want speed, abandon the HDD. Any ssd is 4-8x faster sequentially and 40x faster in random I/O than even a 10k HDD.
Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
In fact, if your block of data were to be spanned on two drives, random times would be greater.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a older study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

And a newer report:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449-4.html

Spoiler... no benefit at all.


If you want backup, you need to start with some sort of EXTERNAL backup.
That protects you from ransomware, hardware failure, user error.

Raid 1-6 protects you from device failure.
But, device failure is much less with a ssd.
Here is a puget report on hardware reliability:

Raid has some value if you require high uptime.
But, if you can handle recovery time, raid is not needed.
 
Feb 14, 2022
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Rethink your objectives.
Yeah... You might be right... I should have rethinked this whole operations before I bought the drives. Nonetheless I'll use them unRAIDed and just use one of them as backup.

If you want backup, you need to start with some sort of EXTERNAL backup.
So if I have 2 identical drives and assign one of them as main drive and the second as backup and I make backups everyday the backup drive is less likely to fail because it is used less frequently, right? (Assuming the backup drive is disconnected from the PC when not doing backups)
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
So if I have 2 identical drives and assign one of them as main drive and the second as backup and I make backups everyday the backup drive is less likely to fail because it is used less frequently, right? (Assuming the backup drive is disconnected from the PC when not doing backups)
Physical drive fail is not the only reason for a good backup plan.
Not even the most important.