2.5 inch Raid 10 or 3.5 inch Raid 1 ?

[vizion]

Hello,

Which do you think is more fun for everday/general use ? Fill rate is about 800mb.

4x 7200 rpm 750gb 2.5-inch sata drives (raid 10) = 1.5TB
2x 7200 rpm 2TB 3.5-inch sata drives (raid 1) = 2.0TB

Thanks.

[korben69]

Depends on some factors :
1° - Casing Space : 4 x 2"1/2 vs 2 x 3"1/2. Enough space ?
2° - Power for feeding your HDD ? (See Datasheet for power consumption)
3° - Heat : should be close as they are both 7200rpm.
4° - Perfomance : R10 seems to be a little bit faster vs R1. You won't see any difference, only if you perform regular read/write operations with a lot of small size files. What is the purpose for those HDD ?
5° - Cost : 3"1/2 are cheaper than 2"1/2, more reliable too IMHO.

I'll go for R1 with 2 x 2Tb for DATA + 1 x SSD for OS if you've got enough $.
My input, hope this helps

[sebash]

Alternatively depending on your budget an SSD for the boot drive and applications and raid 1 3.5" for data redundency

[planet10]

3.5" drives (even at the same RPM) tend to be faster than 2.5" and are cheaper and more reliable.

dave

[vizion]

Thanks, guys. Icy Dock's dual 2.5-inch drive bay for the Mac Pro piqued my interest. I was thinking of getting an ATTO raid card using 4x 2.5-inch 7200rpm drives in raid 10 or 6x 2.5-inch drives in raid 50. So I guess 2x 3.5-inch 7200rpm drives will be better.

[planet10]

When we sell a RAID (part-time Mac support guy), we sell them with 4 drives. 3 for the RAID (the 2nd needs to be swapped out regularily and put somewhere safe (where it won't burn up, get flooded etc), and a 4th drive to extend the life of the RAID investment when the 1st drive dies.

dave

[korben69]

You're right to use a good Raid adapter !
I'm not a Mac guy (PC one...), I've been f....d many times using Intel integrated Raid.
Think about activating SMART function if available, usefull too.
2 x 3"1/2 7200rpm is good choice !

[pinkmouse]

Raid 10? Last time I looked it was only up to four!

[SlainNothing]

if your goal is general use and not server critical speed and redundancy then a raid 1 (mirror) will be perfectly fine.

use motherboard raid to save cost.
buy a pci express if you want better speed.

i recommend a SSD for boot/apps and the raid 1 for storage.
i would recommend 3.5" WD black HD sata6.0 . not green. not blue.
2.5" drives are faster: Raptors, scsi, SSD
2.5" laptop harddrives are slow but reliable. use if its a mobile build.

if you want speed and redundancy use raid 0 + 1. using 4 drives.

raid 5 and 10 are made for the lowest number of drives for redundancy/speed for large business with many many drives to help reduce cost.
not good for consumer use. you must have the correct disk saved and the rest of the raid must work to use the backup hard drive.
in raid 1 :swap out a full mirror every so often to keep a full backup.

[sebash]

oh and just figured I would mention this, RAID is not a backup solution. If you have data that you want to make sure its secure you will still need to back it up to something else and then securely store that something else somewhere else. RAID just ups your chances a bit of not losing everything when an HD does fail.