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To RAID or not to RAID

DavePhipps
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DavePhipps polycounter lvl 7
I've got three 1 terabyte HDDs and Win7 64 bit. I'm thinking of doing a reformat and setting it up as a RAID 0 (Striping only) and having an online and offline backup set for my data files.
Is the speed increase and efficiency of striping worth it?
The apps I use are 3dsMax2012, Mudbox, Sculptris, Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, and VirtualBox.
I may be going to Win 8 64 bit in the near future if all my applications are compatible
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  • oXYnary
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    oXYnary polycounter lvl 18
    DavePhipps wrote: »
    I've got three 1 terabyte HDDs and Win7 64 bit. I'm thinking of doing a reformat and setting it up as a RAID 0 (Striping only) and having an online and offline backup set for my data files.
    Is the speed increase and efficiency of striping worth it?
    The apps I use are 3dsMax2012, Mudbox, Sculptris, Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, and VirtualBox.
    I may be going to Win 8 64 bit in the near future if all my applications are compatible

    Do you have a hardware raid card or using onboard Intel Raid?

    Intel Raid is really a software raid, so it will slightly lower the performance of your cpu as to be used for the raid.

    Just get a ssd for windows and put all your programs and files on these other drives. If you want a raid still, I would suggest a Raid 5 because of the redundancy unless you need fast writes.
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  • DavePhipps
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    DavePhipps polycounter lvl 7
    I've done some checking around and it's an AMD SB750 chipset on the Mobo. The "controller" is a Firmware/driver-based RAID which like software RAID takes CPU cycles because it doesn't have it's own dedicated chip.
    No RAID for me unless I get a dedicated card.
    I might just use one as an external and use it for system backup.
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  • Kwramm
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    Kwramm interpolator
    get a SSD, just as oXYnary said. I wouldn't do a raid 5 tho. Raid 5 saves you from hardware failure, but it doesn't save you from your own clumsiness/stupidity. If you accidentally delete a file you need it's gone, both on your main HDD and the raid mirror.
    I suggest getting something like second-copy, MS synctoy or Robocopy to mirror only the important data to a 2nd drive. That way you can still un-do any accidental deletes or overwrites without having to resort to recovery tools.
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  • DavePhipps
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    DavePhipps polycounter lvl 7
    I already have enough drives so no new SSD for me. I'm familiar with Robocopy so no problem there.
    I'll decide in a few weeks which direction best fits my situation. It's nice to have options though.
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  • Ark
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    Ark polycounter lvl 11
    SSD and RAID is a bad idea, you lose TRIM support, unless that's been solved since I last looked into it.
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