SSD / RAID advice ? (And HD Prices)

[opticle]

Hey guys o/ Advice required. Forgive how boring/nerd/n00b this is..

So, I currently run a WD Caviar Black 1TB (SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache) HD on it's own.

I want to RAID this because I'm scared of it dying and losing all my data. I also want to make it faster and playing with computers is fun. I know _nothing_ about this sort of thing as I've never bothered to go there for some reason (never used to have so much media, etc.).

Q 1: What RAID mode is best for this ?
My mobo is an ASUS Sabertooth X58 and I was thinking 0+1 from what I've read.
I'm pretty sure the mobo supports this; it has two built-in RAID/Sata 6gb/s ports and six RAID/Sata 3gb/s ports (btw, will I notice any significant difference using the 3gb vs 6gb/s ports if I add later HDs ? Obviously the ?transfer speed is 2x faster but how does this equate to HD speed ?)
[ http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1366/SABERTOOTH_X58/#specifications ]

Q 2: Does anyone know when the heck HD prices are going to drop again ? The WD HD I bought in July was £55, now it's £120 I'm getting bored of checking prices.

Q 3: To make 0+1 I'm going to have to wipe my existing HD and start over.. which means I need to find some way of backing up all the existing data ( ).. the alternative I was thinking, if I cba so spend a bit more, was to buy a SSD, use that for system and programs and then get another WD HDD and RAID 0+1 that..

..BUT then, as the mobo only has two 6gb/s ports, the SSD would be on a 6gb/s and the 2 WD HDD's would be on 3gb/s ports.. Would that make any difference at all? (Idiot question: the WD 6gb HDs would work on this, right ? Is it worth getting another RAID card or ??)

Q 4: Are SSDs worth it, yet ? Or better to wait until prices drop and capacity goes up?

Obviously most cost-effective right now just to RAID two HDDs, but it would be good to know wtf to do with the other ports if I ever want to expand or get a SSD or two.

Sorry that's so dull and probably n00b-ish. Any help appreciated, just trying to work out the best and most cost-effective way to do things. It's a pretty good mobo (I think) so I don't want to waste what it can do through lack of understanding what I'm doing

Cheers \o/

 

[TdC]

regarding raid, you don't really want anything with a non redundant stripe in any kind of weird construction that they come in.
tbh the still best compromise of speed and redundancy is still raid 5 on two or more decent raid cards (which tends to rule out onboard cards) but if you must, then raid 5 on your onboard card with three disks is a fair setup.

r5 gets you something called a parity stripe, where data and it's parity is spread across all your disks and you get n-1 capacity back for it (eg, three disks get you two, four gets you three) because the parity has to go somewhere, y'see. r5 is also still the best compromise for speed on decent raid cards. onboards are more or less "meh" imo, but a decent dedicated card will cost you. r5 can survive one disk failing (but possibly not a controller -unless you get exactly the same controller back as replacement).

a mirror (eg r1) is a step down in compromise: you get n/2 capacity and depending on your controller possible speed bumps for read performance as the controller will round-robin your read requests. write requests on the other hand are usually the same as a single disk re performance. a mirror can survive a single disk failure because it is basically two (or any even number) disks with exactly the same data on the members.

imo SSD disks are nice if you're an enthusiast, but size and costs tend to be a limiting factor. you can get a whole bunch of mechanical disks and perhaps even a dedicated controller for the price of a couple of decent 256GB SSD's. that said, I have been running on them for a while now, and tbh I don't really see a noticeable difference when I run my linuxes for normal usage....unless I am installing something on the windows school laptop. that one has two striped sata600 SSD's and installing something like MS-SQL server was a breeze compared to the other guys in class heh. Other than that...meh. That said, I do not have a current knowledge of SSD prices and performance. You want to be really careful getting an SSD with a good controller chip in it. Very important for performance.

 

[opticle]

Thanks Ok, so let's ditch the SSD plan for now and I'll consider RAID 5..

Does the 6gb/s vs. 3gb/s transfer speed make much of a difference at the moment ? (If setting up >2 HDs, guessing will have to use the 3gb/s ports).

 

[TdC]

yes, I'm sorry I didn't mention that: if you're going to set up multiple disks best plan of action is to get everything identical : same disks, same firmware, same raid card/s. mixing and matching is usually not a good idea if you want stability and redundancy. a plan could be to get three identical s600 or s300 disks depending on what you have qua sata sockets and power supply available.

 

[TdC]

also, afaik you can connect a 600 disk to a 300 port, but I am not 100% sure on that call. you could get 600 disks as a future proofing exercise against a time where you will be getting a new mobo.

 

[TdC]

oh, and another thing: depending on what on board controller you have, you may not be able to boot off of disk mappings that are larger than 2GB. The Intel storage matrix chips are especially pooh at that kind of thing, whereas I have head good reviews of Marvel chips for some reason.

 

[opticle]

Ta

This answers the 6gb/s vs. 3gb/s thing too \o/
http://www.overclock.net/t/732823/sata-6gb-s-vs-3gb-s-on-cavier-black

Now when the hell will HDDs come down in price

 

[TdC]

yeah I was just looking myself, and they're hella expensive compared to half a year ago :-/

 

[GReaper]

I want to RAID this because I'm scared of it dying and losing all my data. I also want to make it faster and playing with computers is fun. I know _nothing_ about this sort of thing as I've never bothered to go there for some reason (never used to have so much media, etc.).

Sorry to be annoying and pointing this out - RAID is not a backup. If you manage to destroy your partitions/data then RAID isn't going to save you, instead each drive will have a perfect copy of the destroyed data.

If you've got valuable data which you can't afford to lose - get proper backups going. Ideally get some form of backups in another location, there are plenty of online backup providers. If someone breaks into your house and steals your computer and a backup drive - you aren't going to be able to recover if you've lost both.

If it's not super important, but you're just after additional reliability - then excuse the rant!

 

[opticle]

Nah tis a fair point GReaper, though mainly going for reliability - will consider it !