RAID5 rebuilding?

I'm looking to swap out the older 160gb drive in my computer for three 250 or 500 gb SATA drives (havn't decided yet) and hook them up in RAID5 using the Intel RAID controller on my motherboard. I've been doing my homework since I've never set up a RAID before, but the reliability of RAID5 in protecting drive data is important to me as I've had a disk crash in the past :bawl:. I'm just wondering how good RAID5 is at protecting data I guess. Could I forgo having an external backup drive if I'm using RAID5? If I have one of the disks fail, is it as simple as plugging a new disk in and letting the controller do it's magic? Would that new disk need to be the exact same model as the old one, or just have the same capacity?

Thanks much!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Hi.

The disks should all be of the same model. This is because they're working in unison, so they should be spinning at the same speed, same response times etc.

For raid 5, you can just use three hdds, but you're wasting 33% of the storage. With five drives, you can get great speeds (assuming you have a decent raid controller - I've heard inbuilt ones are a bit shit, actually) and are making the most of the drive space.

If you buy two or three spare, you can be sure to have the same model available if/when a drive fails.

If you conclude this is a bit much for a home pc, the just do raid 0 instead and use another drive (say on IDE) to back up important files periodically - that's what I do.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Why pay more for RAID? It really isn't that much faster than a 7500 HD.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

'cos it's fault tolerant.

 

I've not had any problems with mine but I do change them every 3 to 5 years.

 

With raid, you can recover data when drives fail - in addition to faster read/write (depending on the hardware quality)

 

3-5 years is lower than the average drives MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) so for domestic use you'll be fine.

In the corporate world, where we look after hundreds, if not thousands of servers, with several disks in each, RAID or mirroring is a must have. Statistically, we will suffer a failure, so need to plan for that.