RAID 0 and failing hard drive

[JonC]

Basically I have two Samsung 1 TB hard disks set for RAID 0 and have OS and programs installed on it. Data is stored to a separate hard drive. Recenty discovered that one of the drives is failing on the RAID array. I am aware that I need to replace the drive but does it have to be the same brand as the healthy drive or can I get a different brand? Also I will have to reinstall the OS and applications and reconfigure the RAID 0 array correct?

[Steve R Jones]

Since Raid 0 splits the files in half and places them on both drives...A reinstall is a must

Mixing brands is fine..It just need to be another 1TB drive.

[kent1146]

Er, I wouldn't mix brands if you can help it. Ideally, get exactly the same make and model as your healthy drive. Only as an absolute last resort should you look for a different make/model.

And yes, if RAID-0 fails, you need to reformat. That is the penalty you pay when you go RAID-0

[JonC]

What would be the best RAID setup then? One that has speed and fault tolerance. Would that be RAID 5?

[xclite]

What would be the best RAID setup then? One that has speed and fault tolerance. Would that be RAID 5?

Yes. Striping with Parity is nice.

[kent1146]

Read performance of RAID-5 is pretty good. You see a lot of the (theoretical) benefits that you see using RAID-0 in benchmarks. But time and time again has shown that RAID-0 doesn't affect performance very much in real-world use scenarios... just benchmarks. The drawback to RAID-5 is that it can be slow in a lot of small writes or random writes.

You could do RAID 1+0, which gives you RAID-0 performance combined with RAID-1 mirroring. But that requires 4 disks minimum, and is something that some onboard RAID controllers can't handle.

Honestly, if you want speed, then get a single fast SSD and run your OS and Apps off of that. A fast single SSD will perform faster than a RAID-0 array of mechanical drives. I would store your content (documents, photos, videos, porn, etc) on a RAID-1 array of large-capacity mechanical hard drives (500GB, 1TB, or 1.5TB) for redundancy. You have speed where it matters (OS and apps), and you have cheap mirrored large capacity storage where it matters (documents, photos, etc).

[xclite]

I would store your content (documents, photos, videos, porn, etc) on a RAID-1 array of large-capacity mechanical hard drives (500GB, 1TB, or 1.5TB) for redundancy.

I WANT MY PORN AND I WANT IT FAST. That's why I store it on a RAID 0 with 6 solid state disks with 80 TB/s read times.

[JonC]

LOL xclite! What size is your solid state drive for each one?

As far as RAID 1+0 goes, I'm not feeling up to installing four disks right now. Well maybe in the future and also if money allows. Money is tight right now and I wish I could get a SSD drive. Guess I'll wait till the price goes down. Maybe I'll just stick with one 1 TB drive for OS and apps and another 1 TB drive for data