[SOLVED] Motherboard SATA III controller vs. multiple SSD drives in RAID

[shadow_82]

Hi!
I'm thinking of building some house PC which will have 1 NVME drive (for OS mostly) & RAID array made of few SSD SATA III drives (redundant & fast file storage)
Motherboard - for instance: ASUS TUF GAMING B550-PLUS
If it offers up to "6 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s)" and "Raid 0, 1, 10" then...

If I'll make RAID 10 with 6 SSD drives,
I'll have capacity of 6Gb/s shared between all drives or 6Gb/s available per each SSD drive?
6Gb/s = 750MB/s - so it's not so much for today SATA III SSD drives if you think of more than 2

 

[4745454b]

Sata is a serial, independent system, so its 6 x 6Gbps. I'm not sure how amd has their sata ports attached right now so you might not get full speed on all drives if they all hit 100% transfer. Also keep in mind that no drive hits 600MB. 559MB is the best you can expect.
.
I don't suggest raid for any home use. Raid'a purpose is to provide "five nines", or 99.999% uptime for computers that need it. I'm sorry, but that's not you. Just use them as independent disks and make proper backups. I would argue a back up is worth more than raid.

 

[DSzymborski]

Hi!
I'm thinking of building some house PC which will have 1 NVME drive (for OS mostly) & RAID array made of few SSD SATA III drives (redundant & fast file storage)
Motherboard - for instance: ASUS TUF GAMING B550-PLUS
If it offers up to "6 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s)" and "Raid 0, 1, 10" then...

If I'll make RAID 10 with 6 SSD drives,
I'll have capacity of 6Gb/s shared between all drives or 6Gb/s available per each SSD drive?
6Gb/s = 750MB/s - so it's not so much for today SATA III SSD drives if you think of more than 2

The first question to ask is when setting up something like this is: why? There's little purpose to a RAID for 99% of consumers and even less of one when you're talking already very fast storage. What use case do you have that leads you to this? Due to the complexity, redundant expenses, and general riskiness since RAID is not a backup plan, there has to be a very specific reason that makes sense: a storefront, a central depository of very large sequential file transfers, a dedicated server in which being available is more important than data integrity, etc.

 

[USAFRet]

...RAID array made of few SSD SATA III drives (redundant & fast file storage)

Nope.

That will be no faster than individual drives, and is irrelevant because you'd be accessing this over the gigabit LAN.
In addition to giving up 1/2 the drive space in this RAID 10.

SSD + RAID 0 looks great in theory and artificial benchmarks.
In actual user facing benefit? Not so much:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

 

[shadow_82]

Well - my plan is to have a PC ready for virtualization. I have in mind stuff like: GNS3 / EVE-NG network virtualization, some media server for video (like Kodi), some webserver & storage for pictures.
Also I'd need an option for around 8 Windows VMs as VDIs used simultaneously, so the drives might be a bit busier than average says...
But you've surpised me with that RAID 0 does not bring any performance boost comparing to a single drive (I was thinking between RAID 10 and RAID 5 or 6)

Thanks!

 

[USAFRet]

Well - my plan is to have a PC ready for virtualization. I have in mind stuff like: GNS3 / EVE-NG network virtualization, some media server for video (like Kodi), some webserver & storage for pictures.
Also I'd need an option for around 8 Windows VMs as VDIs used simultaneously, so the drives might be a bit busier than average says...
But you've surpised me with that RAID 0 does not bring any performance boost comparing to a single drive (I was thinking between RAID 10 and RAID 5 or 6)

Thanks!

Multiple drives, you can have VM's on any of them.
I do.

A media server? Have that stuff on a large HDD. A 2 hour movie still takes 2 hours to watch, no matter what it lives on or how you access it.
And saving that 7GB movie to some space across your LAN still takes the same amount of time, no matter what it lives on. The LAN is the limiting factor, not the drive type.
In my NAS, the system drive is a 480GB SSD. The other drives are HDD.
There is zero time difference reading or writing to either, because the LAN is the limfac.

The various types of striped RAID (0, 10, 01) sound great on paper.
Outside of a VERY few circumstances, they fall flat in actual use.

And NONE of them are for any 'data redundancy'. RAID 1 can be good, again in certain circumstances, for physical uptime.
For instance, running a webstore and its server, and downtime == lost sales.

A good backup routine can protect your data from physical drive fails, as well as all the other ways of losing your data.
If you can handle 30-60 minutes of recovery time, resurrecting a backup image is painless. I've done it.