Here in a couple of days I’ll finally have the opportunity to order the final piece that will allow me to put my 4 500GB hdd’s in RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). The real question is what sort of RAID array do I go for? I’ve heard a lot of conflicting opinions on the different RAID setups. Originally I wanted to go with a RAID 5 setup… then researching it I started to find a lot of information that showed RAID 5 as ALWAYS having a Hot-Spare drive… No offense, but I don’t need/want a Hot-Spare. I’m not running a full on server environment where information is mission critical… I can lose all my information and I might pout for a few days, but I’ll rebuild it, I mean my websites are all up and running respectively, and most everything can be re-obtained in some form or fashion. So double redundancy isn’t really that necessary… and I don’t need it to be rebuilt THAT fast if there was a failure.

Either way with what I’ve been seeing (don’t know if it’s true or not) but with RAID 5 I end up with 1TB of storage space and a slower speed than RAID 0 w/ 2hdds which then brought me to RAID 10 which also gives me 1TB of storage space but is as fast as two hdd’s in RAID 0. Then there’s RAID 5EE which should give me 1TB of space with who knows what sorts of speeds… I’d say about that of RAID 0 with 3hdd’s but some of the people I’ve read stuff from say no. I’ve also read on TomsHardware that regular old RAID 5 (with no Hot Spare) will give me 1.5TB of space and be as fast as RAID 0 with 3 drives… so I think that’s what I’m going to risk running… if nothing else I’ll make sure and set it up without a hot spare and it’ll give me 1.5TB of hdd space whether or not it runs too much faster.

I’m thinking that the people having troubles with speed come from running RAID with too large of a stripe size so their information isn’t getting spread out. Which brings me to another point… do I make a super small stripe size to force files to be split up, or do I go with a larger stripe size for faster transfer speeds? I’m thinking 64kb stripe size… but maybe 32 would be the better choice since I’ve got a whole bunch of little files for website things that would just eat up hdd space in no time if they were forced to take up 64kb each.