upobDaPlaya
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Determining if RAID is required and bay selection for ssd drive
I am building my own pc and my uses of the pc will be some limited gaming, intermediate movie watching, a lot of surfing, and a lot of ms office work.
I have the following components
Asus motherboard p8z77-m
Corsair 330 r case
Intel 330 series maple crest 120 gb ssd(note I plan to install win 7 on the ssd drive)
Wd 500 3azex 500 gb 7200 7200 rpm
I keep reading about how people go in and configure RAID (which I am still a little sketchy on what it is) and thus I am wondering if :
Do I need to perform raid
Can I just install the ssd drive and western digital hdd and it will be plug and play ? If not what type of configuration do I need to do
Does it matter what bay\drive I put the ssd drive and wd hdd in
I have the following components
Asus motherboard p8z77-m
Corsair 330 r case
Intel 330 series maple crest 120 gb ssd(note I plan to install win 7 on the ssd drive)
Wd 500 3azex 500 gb 7200 7200 rpm
I keep reading about how people go in and configure RAID (which I am still a little sketchy on what it is) and thus I am wondering if :
Do I need to perform raid
Can I just install the ssd drive and western digital hdd and it will be plug and play ? If not what type of configuration do I need to do
Does it matter what bay\drive I put the ssd drive and wd hdd in
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als315
Connect SSD to 6 Gb/s SATA port of motherboard (gray), HDD and DVD to 3 Gb/s - blue
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I'm afraid I have to respectfully disagree with you rindi - sorry. In my 18 years of IT experience, I've found that hardware RIAD is almost always better than software RAID not only in practice but as a matter of formal education.
Software RAID will require your computer's processor to take on all the RAID indexing and processing and will slow your PC down. I do agree with rindi in that many of the hardware RAID controllers that come with motherboards are unreliable.
In my opinion, if your mission is to protect your data and your data has to be on local disks, spend the extra money and buy a real RAID card from Adaptec for instance and configure your two 500GB drives in a RAID 1 setup as others in this post have suggested. Leave your SSD on it's own and use it as the system drive (where Windows is installed).
If you don't want to spend the money on a RAID controller (a good one is pricey), you could go for a cloud backup solution - in the long term you'll spend more money on the cloud solution though. There is another thread on EE that has a very inexpensive solution for this (https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/27992884/Cheap-static-storage.html).
Software RAID will require your computer's processor to take on all the RAID indexing and processing and will slow your PC down. I do agree with rindi in that many of the hardware RAID controllers that come with motherboards are unreliable.
In my opinion, if your mission is to protect your data and your data has to be on local disks, spend the extra money and buy a real RAID card from Adaptec for instance and configure your two 500GB drives in a RAID 1 setup as others in this post have suggested. Leave your SSD on it's own and use it as the system drive (where Windows is installed).
If you don't want to spend the money on a RAID controller (a good one is pricey), you could go for a cloud backup solution - in the long term you'll spend more money on the cloud solution though. There is another thread on EE that has a very inexpensive solution for this (https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/27992884/Cheap-static-storage.html).
You are talking of hardware RAID, and not of those cheap fake-RAID controllers built into most mainboards these days. Real hardware RAID is fine, but it also costs much more, and you also need enterprise class disks to go with them.
Software RAID is no problem at all today. All modern OS's (from Vista/Windows 2008 upwards, or any current Linux distro), is highly performant, you won't notice any speed issues from any modern CPU either. With RAID 1 the system will read the data from both disks simultaneously, speeding up read times, and that most hardware RAID controllers can't do, or not as reliably as the OS RAID.
Software RAID is no problem at all today. All modern OS's (from Vista/Windows 2008 upwards, or any current Linux distro), is highly performant, you won't notice any speed issues from any modern CPU either. With RAID 1 the system will read the data from both disks simultaneously, speeding up read times, and that most hardware RAID controllers can't do, or not as reliably as the OS RAID.
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Good primer on RAID..thanks all as this pints me in the right direction...
Thank you much. : )
Glad we could help - good luck.