Quote:
Originally Posted by kn
I'm slowly converting my media library to digital format and have quickly run out of space on my 3TB drive. I plan to continue adding over the years and want some sort of safeguard against catastrophic failure.
I'm trying to understand the various RAID systems. RAID 0 is a no-go but since this isn't mission critical, I think I can live with RAID 1. From what I've read, this means I lose half of the storage capacity, correct? Isn't this true of RAID 5 as well?
For example, the following storage system comes pre-configured as RAID 5. How much actual storage space is there as a result?
http://store.apple.com/ca/product/HE...fs=s%3DpriceHL
I don't care about write performance as once a movie on disk, it will only ever be read.
I'm using the Apple ecosystem but that shouldn't matter for this situation from my understanding. I'm open to cheaper and alternative solutions but would prefer dealing with fewer drives. I did read Dell not recommending RAID 5 on drives larger than 1TB but don't really understand why.
Thanks. |
The reason Dell doesn't recommend Raid 5 on large drives is because drive rebuild times are so long on drives larger than 1 TB (7k speed) that the chance for a second failure is too large to risk it. This also assumes you have a hot spare hard drive waiting to be built in place of a failed hard drive. Raid 6 takes up 2 drives worth of capacity for redundancy so it can stand 2 failures. Raid 5 can stand a single drive failure. This recommendation is based on business class/enterprise class storage. For your home you have to determine your own risk. If you are also backing up the data elsewhere than I would go ahead and do Raid 5 as you aren't losing revenue like a business if your main storage is down. If you aren't backing up the data (I would), you might want to do a raid 6 with a spare (if your storage supports this).