Raid 5 vs Raid 0 + backup

[bickg]

Dear Tusken RAIDers, I need to get more storage for my PC for video editing and general purpose... Once I have edited a video, I tend not to touch the data again and archive it on an external HDD, but I would like a faster internal HDD setup with either some redundancy or backup gong also.

Is RAID 5 a little overkill? Would a Raid 0 and a permanently attached backup external drive do the job better?

 

[JaredDM]

First off, keep in mind that RAID isn't the same thing as backup. Redundancy in RAID is only for uptime, because you can lose a drive and still keep working without having to wait 10 hours for your backup set to copy back. RAID will not protect from something like a ransomware virus or accidental deletion/overwrite of data. So even with RAID you still need to have a backup.

That having been said, it's usually not a major investment to buy one extra drive to go from RAID 0 to RAID 5 and you'll be glad you did when you have a drive fail and it's a quick matter of changing it out on the fly without having to stop work.

Just keep in mind too that not all hard drives and RAID controllers are the same. Good HDDs will make a big difference, and using a hardware RAID controller is going to be much faster than trying to do software RAID or RAID from your motherboard.

 

[boosted1g]

Much better off going with an SSD for OS and for active files, then 1 magnetic for storage and another one for backup.

 

[geofelt]

The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years. SSD's are similar.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, raid controller failure fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, and can tolerate some recovery time, you do not need raid-1

 

[bickg]

First off, keep in mind that RAID isn't the same thing as backup. Redundancy in RAID is only for uptime, because you can lose a drive and still keep working without having to wait 10 hours for your backup set to copy back. RAID will not protect from something like a ransomware virus or accidental deletion/overwrite of data. So even with RAID you still need to have a backup.

That having been said, it's usually not a major investment to buy one extra drive to go from RAID 0 to RAID 5 and you'll be glad you did when you have a drive fail and it's a quick matter of changing it out on the fly without having to stop work.

Just keep in mind too that not all hard drives and RAID controllers are the same. Good HDDs will make a big difference, and using a hardware RAID controller is going to be much faster than trying to do software RAID or RAID from your motherboard.

Thanks for your info and thoughts. So If i need a backup anyway, I guess the choice is simply between the two RAID types. I can tolerate a bit of downtime if an HD goes down and I also run a cloud backup at all times. What sort of speed/CPU load differences are we looking at with a software vs. hardware RAID?

 

[geofelt]

Once you are covered by external backup, you can look for speed and reliability,
Look at a ssd; with no moving parts, it will be more reliable.
A ssd will be 50x faster in small random I/O, that is what windows does mostly.
A sata ssd will be 2-3 x faster than the best hard drive in sequential operations. A pcie based ssd may be 10x faster in sequential.

The only real advantage of a hard drive is the cost per gb of storage.
A hard drive takes more power, runs hotter, takes up more space and is noisier.
By doubling up on hard drives for redundancy, you are doubling up on that cost.