Help with RAID levels

[raffrox]

I'm starting to sort out the specs for a new pc and I'm a bit confused but RAID and the different levels.

My understanding is that RAID-0 is fast but if you lose the data, your toast.

What do other people have and what would be the best set up for a pc which is going to be mainly used for gaming and the storage of a large amount of family photos and video footage (and video editing)?

Thanks.

 

[jim boy]

RAID 1 should do you, that level will protect you against disk failure as it mirrors everything. It'll be fine for games as disk speed isn't the most important things - processing power, graphics card and memory being much more important. If you have got the cash to splash, you could could go RAID 0+1, which is striping mirrored, but you'd need four disks and two controllers and I dount you'll see any benefit.

 

[JasRulz63]

The main problem with RAID 0 is if one of the hard drives fail (or the controller) then you lose everything on the entire array (basically everything on all the hard drives). RAID 0 supposedly helps quite a bit with loading times of Windows, copying files etc. The most faster hard drives would do for games is decrease loading time I would think.

For you, as JB said, RAID 1 is good. Basically backing up as you go. Or you could just go the old fashioned way, and just run normal hard drives, backing up those precious photos and videos onto a portable hard drive and/or DVDs.

 

[raffrox]

Cheers for the info. Much appreciated.

I had a back up external drive and it lasted 6 months before it broke. Lost some stuff that wasn't on my pc but not much. I've been a bit freaked out since then though.

So to run RAID 1 you'd need two drives? If I had two 500 Gb drives then my total capacity for data on my pc would be 500 Gb with both drives being a mirror of the other? (sorry if these are stupid questions!!)

 

[JasRulz63]

Yes to both questions.

 

[Jafa]

I do Raid 1 but I also backup important data to an external source (usually external drive). Raid only protects against hardware failure. Software meltdowns will still wreck everything.

 

[raffrox]

Top work. Cheers for that.