Is RAID worth it in your home desktop?

[KuJoe]

As I mentioned in another thread I just posted, I am in the process of building a new desktop for gaming/VMs and I was wondering if RAID is worth having for a home desktop? I currently plan to have 2x 120GB SSDs in RAID0 strictly for Steam/Battle.net/Origin and 2x 256GB SSDs in RAID1 for the OS and VMs along with a single 160GB laptop drive I had lying around for random storage (backups, ISOs, etc...). I'm waiting for my new SATA cables to get here so I nothing is really set in stone so I'm wondering what everybody else is doing for their home desktop, are you running RAID and if so what's your setup? In the many many many years of owning computers, the only drive to actually go bad on me is a drive currently in my old NAS that has some bad sectors but is otherwise usable. I've only ever used onboard RAID (FakeRAID?) controllers once before on a desktop I through together with a bunch of spare parts (RAID0 for performance and storage because the drives were pretty old) so I don't know if it's even worth doing for SSDs without a dedicated hardware controller. Another option I was thinking of is I have an old Samsung 830 120GB SSD I'm currently using as an external drive for games so I can easily order another 120GB drive and setup 4 of them in RAID10 and then drop the 160GB HDD and have a single 256GB drive for the OS.


Thoughts?

 

[drmike]

RAID hmmmm.  I've always considered redundancy an expensive luxury, especially for self-use.


I run SSD for boot drives and usually pack a spinning drive rust pile for other stuff that breaks out on space.  Yeah 1TB SSDs aren't cheap enough yet.


Anything that is important and I don't want to lose, I replicate to RAID-1 NAS on LAN.  That NAS replicates to no-RAID secondary unit.  Ideally I'll graft an encrypted and off-site location into that in the future.


Is that enough? Probably with the off site.  Ideally I'd do two off site + original workstation + on LAN NAS.  Storage bloat though to do that or even what I am doing.


RAID-10 on workstation?  Sure would be alright with SSDs if you can afford that or get away with using smaller drives so it's more affordable.  RAID-10 spinnies, meh, chews up power, creates audible annoyance and mass vibration.

 

[HBAndrei]

Ever since I had a 120GB SSD die on me a year ago, on my desktop, I decided to go with RAID1 2x120GB SSD for the OS partition at least, and then spare HDDs for storage that has basically no value if lost.


It is double the cost but it saves you the time and headache of a possible SSD failure, even though it's just a personal desktop and not a server, I think it's worth the cost.

 

[KuJoe]

I'm not worried about data loss really, everything important is replicated to 3 servers in different locations in real time and backed up nightly to a second NAS, a USB drive, and a VPS in another state so I'm fine there. I'm more concerned that if my OS drive dies it can take me a while to get back up and running.

 

[web-project]

pointless for home usage, better to get network 1-4 TB hard drive and use it for sharing files inside of home network with members of family and backup purporse

 

[LibreServers]

I built a major gaming rig last year, and my opinion is that you want the SSDs in Raid 1. More than Raid 1 seems pointless to me for a home computer, if a drive dies you'll replace it, but meanwhile you're online. The odds of 2 drives dying at the same time is low. I don't trust SSDs to ever them not in Raid. If you need more storage space just add some spinning drives.

 

[willie]

I think it is worth it and would use it if I could, but my main machines at home are laptops with just one drive slot.  I've had multiple HDD failures in home computers and one more gradual SSD failure.  I do back stuff up but nowhere near as systematically as I should.  So basically if I'm working on code at home, I push regularly to a remote git repo, but for other stuff I'm more exposed than I'd like to be.  I should do something about that.  I've been using USB external hard drives for backup but my laptop has an SD card slot, so I might put a card into it and do regular differential backups to it from cron or something.

 

[sv01]

pointless for home usage, better to get network 1-4 TB hard drive and use it for sharing files inside of home network with members of family and backup purporse

personally I use 256 GB for OS, RAID 1 = 2x 2 TB WD for storage. when you lost your data please don't cry, I know raid is not a backup, that why I backup my data to few different location/country.

 

[Hxxx]

If you are not worry about data loss, raid 0 that bitch  . Is all about performance right? 

 

[KuJoe]

I almost caved and went with a single SSD for the boot drive because I was having such a hard time getting Windows 7 installed properly. Come to find out that I had the USB drive plugged into a USB 3.0 port so that was 4 hours wasted.


Decided to go with the RAID1 just because I don't want to risk being offline from a drive failure. Can't wait to try out the RAID0 on these cheap SSDs I picked up though.

 

[PowerUpHosting-Udit]

After few initial couple of incident, I have been personally using RAID 1 on my Home Desktop. With SSDs going cheap, it makes it real easy and affordable to go RAID 1. 

 

[OnSebastian]

Depending on your usage you should choose for a RAID setup (or not).


While it might never be wrong to have a RAID in your PC, it may not be necessary when all of your important files are storage on some SAN and you just use your windows "customizations" in case of hard disk failure.

 

[web-project]

personally I use 256 GB for OS, RAID 1 = 2x 2 TB WD for storage. when you lost your data please don't cry, I know raid is not a backup, that why I backup my data to few different location/country.

haha, very odd comments, as it's not for business purpose we are still talking about home purpose, the lacie network drive last long from my experience and using my tech skills, I recovered the data from two almost dead hard drives on my desktop pc in past.

 

[sv01]

haha, very odd comments, as it's not for business purpose we are still talking about home purpose, the lacie network drive last long from my experience and using my tech skills, I recovered the data from two almost dead hard drives on my desktop pc in past.

some of my hardisk 10 years in service never has problem, some of them only has 1 month life. so that the reason don't do raid? none can guarantee when your hardisk die,


No matter what skill do you have to recovery data, copy data from other hardisk (RAID) much faster and almost has identical data.
 

 

[KuJoe]

My onboard RAID (AMD RAIDXpert) is getting extremely annoying now. Every other reboot I need to rebuild the array for some reason so now I'm just going to tear down the RAID1 and just create weekly images of the C: and do real-time replication to my NAS for the other drives. Almost bought a RAID controller tonight but decided not to because I don't know how I feel about a $50 RAID card.

 

[HN-Matt]

As I mentioned in another thread I just posted, I am in the process of building a new desktop for gaming/VMs and I was wondering if RAID is worth having for a home desktop? I currently plan to have 2x 120GB SSDs in RAID0 strictly for Steam/Battle.net/Origin and 2x 256GB SSDs in RAID1 for the OS and VMs along with a single 160GB laptop drive I had lying around for random storage (backups, ISOs, etc...).

[...]

I'm more concerned that if my OS drive dies it can take me a while to get back up and running.

[...]

My onboard RAID (AMD RAIDXpert) is getting extremely annoying now. Every other reboot I need to rebuild the array for some reason so now I'm just going to tear down the RAID1 and just create weekly images of the C: and do real-time replication to my NAS for the other drives. Almost bought a RAID controller tonight but decided not to because I don't know how I feel about a $50 RAID card.

If it's only a gaming machine, presumably there's nothing of importance on it, or not 'important' enough to take extra precautions re: redundancy. Especially if it's just going to give you headaches.

I've never had RAID in any of my home computers. I don't even automate backups. Why bother? Occasional, infrequent backups to an external drive seems to be enough.


Then again, I've never had SSD in any of my own either. Is it because SSD are more prone to suddenly 'just die' out of nowhere a lot sooner than HDD? (I've no personal experience of that either, but have heard some horror stories.)

 

[KuJoe]

Oh man what a headache. Deleted the RAID1 on Sunday morning and tried restoring from an image I made the night before and finally got back online about 10 minutes ago. My OS isn't on an array anymore but I had to set my BIOS to treat my SATA ports are RAID (IDE and ACHI didn't work). Fun times.

 

[texteditor]

My edgy opinion is that RAID is always overkill for home usage.


At home you don't need perfect uptime, at home you don't need your disks to saturate a 10gbe interface


What you need at home is backups or an easy way to restore, so I think low-power-usage, less-harsh-on-disk options like using Snapraid with JBOD or rsync'ing important directories is more than good enough