In the Eye of the Beholder

This week I migrated my 4 disc RAID 0+1 array to a RAID 5 array using the nForce RAID management software utility that came with my XFX nForce 680i LT motherboard. The transition from one array to the other took the better part of the day, but I feel it was well worth the time, and everything went smoothly with no problems detected.

I have 4 identical Seagate Barracuda ST3250410AS 7200.10 250GB drives that I use for my RAID array. I started out wanting a RAID array when I built my computer because I wanted a bit of redundancy since I got a little paranoid over a recent hard drive failure on my old computer that left all data on it unrecoverable. At the time, RAID 0+1 seemed like the perfect answer for both performance and redundancy, and for all intents and purposes I had for it, it was more than adequate.

Lately though I’ve been wanting more storage space, but with my budget now being in the red, I’ve decided to migrate to a RAID 5 array using the perfectly good HDD’s I already have, as opposed to paying for larger drives that I really can’t afford right now. RAID 5 still offers all the read performance I could ever need, and the slower write performance is a non-issue with me, it also seems that my system is powerful enough that it doesn’t suffer any noticeable performance loss when processing the parity data.

This has given a much needed increase in storage capacity, going from 500GB of storage in RAID 0+1 to 750GB of storage using RAID 5. Yes, I could have 1TB of storage if I used JBOD, RAID 0, or used them as just single drives, but I am very much enjoying having a bit of data loss protection should I lose a drive.

To further increase performance, I installed a 5th HDD I had laying around from my old computer, a Western Digital Caviar 250GB, that the system uses for virtual memory, and also serves as a scratch disk for Adobe Photoshop.