Suggestions for Storage solution

[jiewmeng]

things i am looking for:

• reliability (my prev USB HDD failed)
• backups (probably incremental for important data)
• energy efficient
• performance (at least faster than my current ~20MB/s laptop HDD speeds)

i think it can double as my main storage solution? loads OS too?

i am thinking of building a new desktop with storage as:

• 3 WD Cavier Green (RAID5)
• 1 OS partition
• 1 data partitions (data i use often)
• 1 backup partition (i shldn't touch this partition too often)

but i wonder if i shld get separate storage for backups (more expensive and slower tho)? will stuffing 3 (probably quite big, 1 or 2TB maybe) HDD waste power and is less secure? prone to corruption, virus, etc?

i think SSD will be an overkill for OS? will RAID5 improve performance?

 

[Everlong]

Well running 3 of them 2TB HDDs in RAID5 will still give you 4TBs of usable space including parity for.

RAID5 will improve read performance, as data is striped across the 2 drives, so read speed will be similiar to that of RAID0, but write speed will be slower as you'll be writing the file twice, in essence, once across the stripe, and then a second time to the parity drive.

SSD isn't an overkill for an OS, that's the recommended usage for SSDs right now, but you wouldn't be able to have it within your RAID array.

It's up to you if you want to add a standalone HDD for backup as well. You could if you wanted to and keep it outside your RAID. Another WD Green HDD wouldn't increase power usage that much.

 

[jiewmeng]

hmm... thinking abt the SSD for OS/Programs. i was thinking abt SSD's will benefit mainly OS/Program startup and data read/write (but i dont store data on the SSD). so it will provide only faster startups, correct me if i am wrong, so i was wondering if its worth the premium price? maybe i can invest in other parts? CPU/GPU maybe?

 

[Everlong]

Well if you're going to setup RAID5, the increased read speeds will speed up boot time. It's up to you really, an SSD will give you a boot time of around 10-20 seconds, and a HDD can take up to a minute and more, though if you set RAID5 up, boot times will decrease with the fast read speeds of RAID5.

If I had the money to spare, then I possibly would buy a decent 30-40GB SSD as they're around £100, which isn't too bad.