I'm going with RAID 5 this time...

Great. Wonderful. Don't you just love hard drive failure? Ugh. One of my two primary RAID 0 drives is kicking the bucket. Luckily, I'm still able to get Windows to boot and back up my data, which I'm doing as we speak. I think the HDD error is somewhere the scratch disk uses - after a while of usage the computer just locks, but until then everything functions normally. But that's beside the point. After doing some research, I decided to upgrade from RAID 0 to RAID 5 to preserve high data transfer speeds but to give myself some protection against this in the future. Here's what i'm gonna do:

Current:
2x500GB WD Caviar Blue in RAID 0

New setup:
3x750GB WD Caviar Black in RAID 5

So I get to more than double my HDD space while in theory increasing data transfer speeds (by arraying data over 3 disks simultaneously) and increasing protection from the hard drive boogeyman (by allowing fault tolerance on 1 drive at a time). I'd like to add a 4th drive in there, but at $75 each, it starts getting a little pricey. Though now that I think about it, I could probably get either 500GB or 640GB drives for around $50 each. What do you think?

What do you need that much space for?


I don't use more then 70gb

All I use is windows 7, css, ssdk, minecraft lol and about 12gigs of eurodance music


And how long did you have the drives? Because I never had a drive die on me..


O ya and go SSD or go home.

I feel ya, I need more HDD and RAID them

640gb Blacks are supposed to be the fastest Blacks

My wife and I do a lot of graphic design work in Illustrator, which needs GOBS of scratch space. Our business itself takes up about 20GB. All my movies are in HD, music, etc... I am currently using about 750-800GB of space. I guess I don't really need 2.25TB, I've also been considering 4x500GB in RAID 5 plus keeping the one original 500GB drive as the OS drive. IDK. Depends on what the eBay sellers want to do for me - I asked one if he'd sell me the 500GB's for $50 each with free shipping.

Newegg has 1TB Blacks on special for $77.99, I also found them on eBay for $73.98 plus $10 shipping (but I bet it could be combined) - this is a SUPER deal.

Raptor or gtfo.

STFU Rxn Maybe he's on budget xD.

But Yea, WD Black HDD are the best if your on budget. If Not Those Raptors are nice! And If you got money SDD baby xD

Yeah, so I, due to my budget, actually got 3 500GB Black drives for $165. Those will go in my RAID 5 setup. I'm going to keep my surviving 500GB Caviar drive from the RAID 0 and load the OS on it and use it as my scratch drive. Everything else besides the OS will go on the RAID drive to guard against drive failure. Should be a sweet running setup. I'll let you know when I get it going (though you'll probably know 'cause i'll be on the server!)

P.S. Word of advice for anyone who takes a HDD from a RAID array and tries to use it as a non-RAID drive: You need to rebuild the MBR before Windows setup will recognize it. I'm kinda fuzzy on the details, but from what I understand, the RAID BIOS writes a RAID-specific master boot record to the drives so Windows setup sees the multiples as a single drive. If you just try and use one drive from a RAID array, Windows cannot recognize it because the MBR is different. What that means for me is I have to get my new drives, install Windows on one of them, load a MBR rebuilder, rebuild the MBR on my Caviar, then setup my RAID array and format the drive I previously installed Windows on. Kind of a long process but I guess you learn as you go. Later!

I don't use more then 70gb

All I use is windows 7, css, ssdk, minecraft lol and about 12gigs of eurodance music


you only do this and you spent how much into your rig? I don't know rather to cry or laugh at the thought of over power. That is like owning a porsche gt3 and sitting in NY traffic all day going back and forth to work.

Ok.... So after doing some more research, I figured out that RAID 5 was NOT the way to go. Apparently the write times are terrible because of the parity calculations. Anywho, this is the current situation:

Remaining 500GB Caviar SE16 - Root Windows drive (also used for large page file and graphic design scratch)

2x500GB Caviar Blacks set up as 1TB RAID0 stripe - all my programs and user data (migrated Program Files and Users using NTFS junctions as well as Registry edits)

1x500GB Caviar Black used as backup of the important stuff (pictures of my daughter, music, movies, etc....)

Glad to be back online. Now just to copy everything from the backup drive and re-install, update, load drivers, ugh.... But such is life.

Hope to see you all in-game VERY soon...

Neb