Which hard drives for my RAID array?

C

Citizen _insane

Gawd
Joined
May 2, 2006
Messages
565
I currently have 2 seagate 500gb drives, I'm looking to pick up another 2 to run on a Dell Perc 5i card.

Current drives:
ST3500630AS
ST3500641AS

Is there any reason to stick with seagate (other than I like their drives)?

The ST3500630AS's are $70 on newegg, they come with a 5yr warranty, would these be a good choice? I'm not going for super high speed, I just want the reliability of a RAID 5 array so I don't lose data.
 
If you're going to build a raid-5, I'd suggest getting drives of the exact same model # as a best practice, and buying them all at one time helps to ensure that...but that kind of looks to be out of the question, at the moment....soo....

I'd say see if you can find 2 drives that are identical to one of the ones that you already have. Make the 1-off drive the parity drive, or a hot-spare for the new array. Having all the same drives is always best, but not always possible. When all of the drives can;t be the same, having all but 1 is your next best bet. Drive geometries become very important, very quickly in RAID sets, to keep the controller from having to do extra work. This becomes more important with the more disks present in the array.

That being said, having all the disks the same in the array will also ensure that you're entire array is usable. If you have a 4x 500GB drives, but one is only showing 498GB because it's a different model #, then the entire array will consist of 4x 498GB drives in the logical view, since the controller will take the least common denominator.
 
Since my OS is currently installed on one of the 500gb drives, could I use something like Norton Ghost or a linux live disk to clone everything over so I don't have to reinstall all my programs again? I've never done this before, so some tips would be nice.
 
Citizen _insane said:
Since my OS is currently installed on one of the 500gb drives, could I use something like Norton Ghost or a linux live disk to clone everything over so I don't have to reinstall all my programs again? I've never done this before, so some tips would be nice.
Click to expand...

Yes, it should do an exact byte-for-byte copy over of your OS partition so you wouldn't have to set anything up again. :)

Another piece of software that does this is Acronis True Image Home, I've used it a bunch of times on mine, friend's, and relative's computers before and it worked flawlessly.
 
Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out. Does it run via a boot disk or something? I assume it must since you can't copy bit by bit from within the OS installed on the drive.
 
Citizen _insane said:
Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out. Does it run via a boot disk or something? I assume it must since you can't copy bit by bit from within the OS installed on the drive.
Click to expand...

I haven't used Ghost before, but I'm pretty sure it has a boot disc from which the application would load and copy the partition over before the system boots into the operating system.

As for Acronis, there's no boot disc, but the procedure calls for a restart in which case the copying procedure would occur before the operating system is booted up as well.

So, either case, you should be fine. :)
 
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