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Thread ID: 127661	2012-11-06 01:15:00	JBOD vs RAID0 and other general storage advice	dugimodo (138)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
1310654	2012-11-06 01:15:00	Sorry this is going to be a bit of a wall of text so my thanks to anyone who actually reads it. For the TL;DR crowd - is there any reason not to stripe vs JBOD and would you RAID5 WD green drives ? My PC is getting rather cluttered with hard drives and I'm wanting to clean it up and simplfy things a bit as it's getting hard to keep things organised so I'm looking for some advice/ opinions. My motherboard has 4 SATA 600 ports and 4 SATA 300 ports for a total of 8, 1 is used by a Blu-ray reader/DVD-RW and the other 7 all have hard drives connected. I have been considering an external DVD-RW drive as I use the optical drive only occasionally. Presently; 1 x SSD 256GB - windows 7 1 x samsung 1TB partitoned into 2 with windows 8 on one partition and a regular backup image of C: on the other 1 x seagate 2TB - the drive I download to and store general junk on 4 x WD green 2TB configured in two 4TB dynamic Volumes with all my various media files on them - about half full I also have a 120GB SSD available and a 2 BAY NAS that only has a single 1TB drive in it at the moment. So my questions are about how best to tidy this up without wasting all the drives I have. I would love to have 5 drives in a RAID 5 array or create 1 large volume some other way but what I read about WD Green drives and RAID makes this seem impractical and RE drives are too expensive to consider replacing everything. I don't mind buying 1 or 2 other drives max but I'm not replacing the whole lot. I have a backup of my windows installation and some critical (to me) media files but I don't worry too much about the rest as although there's a lot of it I can replace it all from the original Media if it comes to that. I believe windows dynamic volumes are effectively doing JBOD with the 2 pairs of drives, I could stripe them instead either with the onboard RAID controller or windows disk management - all that achieves is more speed but it seems like JBOD offers no advantages over striping and is just slower ? I originally got the NAS with a thought to storing a lot of my media on it and/or scheduling regular backups of my PCs (I had 2 at the time, down to 1 now) but it didn't really work out for 3 reasons, 1. it's a bit slow, 2.Windows 7 home premium won't backup to network drives, 3. I like to carry all my files around with me when I take the PC places and don't like to take a lot of external devices	dugimodo (138)
1310655	2012-11-06 01:57:00	www.drivebender.com Takes all your drives, makes it into one big one (like jbod) - but at a folder level you can say - duplicate this folder (keeping the content on multiple drives). Advantages over RAID - differing drive sizes, and while raid is good when a drive fails, it's crap when the controller goes - unless you can find the exact model again. Ok so it's not as efficient on space, but it's better than raid 1.	psycik (12851)
1310656	2012-11-06 02:33:00	Wow, that's a LOT of storage, dugimodo!! drive bender looks impressive - especially at half price ($US20) today. Pity I don't have a use for it. Don't have 11 TB of drives to fill:)	linw (53)
1310657	2012-11-06 10:56:00	WD Green would probably be the worst choice for RAID. Not only do they have the 8-second-idle head unload timer by default, they of course do not have TLER. And they're slow.	Agent_24 (57)
1310658	2012-11-09 01:09:00	Disaster to your drives (most likely, less likely) 1) hard disk failures 2) mainboard / motherboard failure 3) fire / theft 4) RAID controller failure I usually consider my stuff too important to use with RAID0 / JBOD, with very rare exceptions. I'd strongly suggest avoiding any software RAID solution. I'd stick with your motherboard's RAID chips, or a inexpensive RAID controller. Highpoint RocketRAID make some nice ones. All RAID controller and most motherboards chips support at least RAID1 and RAID 5. With four drives, RAID10, RAID 0+1, and RAID 1+0 are also good. Again I'd stay away from RAID0. I usally try to use all the same make/model drives within a RAID set, for no particular reason. Using WD green drives with RAID 5 sound fine to me. I like these cheap disk bays by the way: Welland EZStor	kingdragonfly (309)
1310659	2012-11-09 03:56:00	Thanks for your thoughts, a couple points from me. Software RAID is portable - i.e. you can move the drives to another machine running the same OS and it should work fine. Hardware RAID requires the same controller in both or the array will need to be rebuilt and all the data restored from a backup. Also all it does is add a little overhead - my CPU can handle it. Onboard RAID or using a cheap RAID card is still largely software based and the CPU still gets some overhead from it. I was planning on using the onboard controller to do RAID 5 to provide some protection against drive failure but research indicates green drives are not well suited for it - especially with proper RAID controllers. It seems like for simple 2 disk RAID 0 or 1 they are ok but for anything more than that they should not be used. Something about TLER and the head parking patterns etc. Proper hardware RAID controllers cost as much as a whole PC. I've decided JBOD is pointless with identical drives - striping achieves the same thing with the same risk and doubles the performance(almost). I only used it because converting an existing disk to dynamic and extending the volume onto another drive is quick and easy and loses no data. Having said that my storage drives have no need for more performance, the data tends to go on and stay there and it takes no real speed for playback duties. I think I might just replace my 1TB and 2TB drives with a single 3TB, recycle my old SSD for dual booting the 2nd OS, and convert all the WD green drives back to individual drives. I just like the Idea of a single huge volume with some protection against drive failure but it seems like it's not really practical without spending a lot of money.	dugimodo (138)
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