Question : Should I use one or two Raid Arrays

Hi All,

I am designing a machine which i need to be reliable and i am wondering whether to use one or two raid arrays.

The system in total will have 11 or 12 Hard Drives. My original plan was to use 2 x 250GB HDD's with Raid 1 using the onboard Raid and to use a seperate Raid Card to put Raid 5 accross the other 10 drives.

The system is designed to store video, The 2 x 250GB Drives will be used for the OS & the other 10 x 2TB Drives will be used for storage.

Do people think this is a good and reliable setup or have people any better suggestions???

I look forward to your reply,

Thanks,

Stephen

Answer : Should I use one or two Raid Arrays

you setup will work fine.

however, if you are streaming video off then RAID 5 performance will be nearly as good as RAID 0.  However, if  you are writing as well then performance will drop thru the floor as parity writes will slow things down.

your choice of raid controller for the RAID 5 array will be key to all of this.  If you buy a cheap card, you will have crap performance.