To RAID or not to RAID? 2023 edition.

BigBadBeef

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Motherboards having multiple M.2 slots appears to be trickling further and further down the price ranges of motherboards, so I would once again like to revisit the notion of using RAID in 2023.

As you may or may not know, as you go higher and higher with speeds and capacity of M.2 devices, the price begins to increase exponentially. Alongside with that, ever more bulky cooling solutions are required, with some top of the line options requiring cooling involving heat pipes.

So what if one were to reach for something in a bit more reasonable price range and go for that classic friend of ours - mr. RAID?!?

Now I know plenty about raid, I know about its various configurations, I know about its strengths and weaknesses, issues on modern systems etc. What I don't know about is the various requirements about there being sufficient number of PCI-E pipelines being available for the system itself since they do take up lanes on that bus. But no matter, I will nosey around when the time comes.

There doesn't seem to be a consensus among enthusiasts as to whether one should opt for cheaper storage in RAID configuration. What do you guys think?
 


I don't know anything about Raid.
I do know about component failure due to heat.
If I were going to spend money and time setting up a new system I would not go cheap.
I would go with the best air cooling devices I could afford and a large spacious computer case with several cooling fans to remove the heat.
 
Just supposing I were to need to set something like this up, I'd opt for known quality components, & I'd likely stick with spinning disks, until such time as I couldn't purchase them, there's nothing wrong with old technology for reliability.
 
Well, as RAID is not a backup, I'd say you should go with what you'd normally go with. If you'd normally go for cheaper drives, then go with cheaper drives. If you'd normally spend more, then spend more.

 
I avoid RAID in general because ... I have helped many people who used RAID and had serious issues with it. RAID has its place. It can offer benefits in cost, performance, and/or availability. If used in an operational capacity (day-to-day use), it requires maintenance and attention.

Look at that link in @KGIII's post #4 above. If you are thinking about deploying RAID, read it first.

RAID can burn you real bad, and from my experience, it eventually does. Businesses use RAID. I have not seen RAID in personal use much. Basically all of the RAID situations I encountered resulted in significant data losses to their owners. They were always misconfigured or badly unmaintained. When asked, I never recommend RAID. Frankly, the people who buy it do not understand the subtle details well enough to use it correctly.

For my personal use at home, I have RAID only for high performance in temporary uses. I have two external drive cases with "hardware RAID" built-in. They have "fast" Thunderbolt and USB 3 interfaces. I bought the RAID cases from OWC. Each case has a pair of matched fast spinning drives. The RAID is striped for performance. There is no redundancy. If one of the two internal drives fail inside the case, all of the data in the case is lost.

I use them to make fast copies of entire systems, then move the RAID case to another computer system for slow copying to drives that are used for offsite storage.

Ignore:
We used to call the act of physically carrying drives from one system to another "sneaker-net".
 
Maybe it is worth elaborating here whether it is hardware RAID or software RAID we are talking about (or both)?

Wiz
 
Maybe it is worth elaborating here whether it is hardware RAID or software RAID we are talking about (or both)?

Wiz
As I mentioned, as the ability to slot multiple M.2 into the motherboard trickles into ever lower price ranges, ergo we are talking about software raid here.
 
Thanks Beef, I understood that, but some others who read this may not.

Cheers

Wiz
 
Well, as RAID is not a backup, I'd say you should go with what you'd normally go with. If you'd normally go for cheaper drives, then go with cheaper drives. If you'd normally spend more, then spend more.
I feel it important to point out that we are not talking about budget, unbuffered, bottom of the barrel stuff here. What I'm talking about is RAIDing mid range consumer storage units to achieve the performance AND capacity of extreme, top of the line, enterprise drives and ending up cheaper for it.

If you're a gamer or someone who needs a lot of graphics power for other reasons, you will want to sensibly snip off costs elsewhere to get the most powerful graphics card that you can. Or maybe CPU if you do a lot of CPU intensive tasks. There are many possibilities. Its about min/max-ing. Its what gives you the most longevity with what you've got. Hell, I'm writing this post on a 10 year old pc that can still run modern games at high resolutions and playable framerates!

I know its not easy, I've had raid before. First you need a motherboard that is friendly to it, then the configuration is "geek only", and lord forbid you ever tinker with the settings after you've got the OS install. If the array were to ever reinitialize, its bye bye data!

But it can be done! And I'm surprised that this community, who are avid Linux tinkerers, doesn't have more people going for it!
 
I'm surprised that this community, who are avid Linux tinkerers, doesn't have more people going for it!

Simplicity is my watch word...... ;)
 
There is a significant difference between RAID in hardware and in software. I was careful to point out in the post above that the RAID drive cases have RAID in hardware.

(In case anyone cares, I have older two-drive OWC Mercury Elite Pro cases for fast data copying for backups. There is a small selector switch on the back to choose different RAID options. With a two-drive case, choices are limited: RAID 0 (striped), RAID 1 (mirrored), Span (single unstriped volume), or Independent (mounts the two drives separately). Changing the selector makes the former data unreadable and probably requires drive reformatting. My cases are configured RAID 0 for high performance. If either drive in the case fails, all the data from both drives is lost. I can live with that for simple backup data transfers.)

Late edit: Fixed typo.
 
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