Question Request recommendations for a RAID controller

[don99]

Planning to buy a Dell T5600 workstation. I would like to install 2 each 5 terabyte disk drives in RAID 1 format. What hardware RAID controller would be suitable for this? Thank you for your help.

 

[USAFRet]

Why the RAID 1?
What is your real backup situation?

 

[Karadjgne]

Never could see the point in raid0 or raid1, to me they were half measures. Raid5/6 at least offered some benefit, but honestly it was raid10 that got the cake and ate it. I used to see 10k raptors in raid0 a lot, back in the day, just to get the fps/load time bonus, but vrs ssd/nvme speeds that's basically redundant now.

Raid1 will get you faster read speeds as it can read from both drives as far as that goes, but that means slower write speeds as there's 2x drives to write to.

To me, a good backup plan, without all the raid hassle, just makes more sense than anything less than raid10.

 

[hotaru.hino]

RAID is really only meant to be a solution to minimize downtime if one or more drives fail, depending on the configuration. That's it. Yes there are some performance benefits to using RAID, but if you need storage performance you're better served using an SSD.

Also a hardware based RAID isn't really useful these days:

 

[don99]

Why the RAID 1?
What is your real backup situation?

Both Karadjgne and hotaru.hino have answered my question. Backup is more important than RAID.

 

[don99]

Never could see the point in raid0 or raid1, to me they were half measures. Raid5/6 at least offered some benefit, but honestly it was raid10 that got the cake and ate it. I used to see 10k raptors in raid0 a lot, back in the day, just to get the fps/load time bonus, but vrs ssd/nvme speeds that's basically redundant now.

Raid1 will get you faster read speeds as it can read from both drives as far as that goes, but that means slower write speeds as there's 2x drives to write to.

To me, a good backup plan, without all the raid hassle, just makes more sense than anything less than raid10.

Your answer is very helpful. Thank you for sharing your ideas.

 

[don99]

RAID is really only meant to be a solution to minimize downtime if one or more drives fail, depending on the configuration. That's it. Yes there are some performance benefits to using RAID, but if you need storage performance you're better served using an SSD.

Also a hardware based RAID isn't really useful these days:

Thank you for your help. Your post helps me understand my thoughts about RAID are outdated.

 

[Karadjgne]

Raid isn't by itself, outdated. If you have a honest use for it, it's extremely handy. Some ppl use pc's extensively, VM's multiple programs, large amounts of highly data important programs etc, so for them an off-site raid setup as backup on an hourly, daily, weekly schedule is very important. For most pc users, just having a hdd, whether integrated or preferably external, is all that's really required.

Sata/nvme has rendered hdd in raid0, useless. They are still faster as a solo drive. Raid1, a simple external hdd/ssd as a backup works just the same, without the issues inherent with drivers and bios in a windows platform. Raid5 is for 3 drives, raid6 is 4 drives, so at that point raid10 is the better option anyway, raid0 speed, raid1 security. But thats a lot of drives to take the place of 1 external hdd/ssd used as a scheduled backup and then unplugged.