RAID 0 + Backup?

[Grayfox]

You wont get any FPS drop in gaming,
The read speed will be the same as a single drive if not a little faster.

Issue with RAID 5 is if a drive fails, you must replace it and wait for the rebuild process to finish which can take days(depends on the size of the drive) which means you will have to keep your system on until this is finished.
And if the drives are all new, the odds of failing around the same time increases since the age is the same.

 

[terminator363]

I was away on holiday but I had a final question, does RAID 5 show up as 1 drive in windows?

 

[Grayfox]

I was away on holiday but I had a final question, does RAID 5 show up as 1 drive in windows?

Any RAID drive will show up as one drive in windows, even RAID 1 which is a mirror shows up as one drive.
This is my RAID 5 which has 4x4TB drives.

 

[Rallywagon]

So as I'm getting ready for Windows 10 and a fresh install, it occured to me that I have 2 identical 1TB hard drives - of which I only really use one. I decided that if I were to use both I'd rather have them as one volume. I knew about JBOD but it didn't really provide any substantial benefit. I decided to bite the bullet and figure out what RAID was all about. After reading a bit it occurred to me that RAID 0 is pretty appealing. Now understanding the issues with reliability, can I buy an external hard drive and just backup the two RAID disks just as I would with one regular HHD? And if one of the internal disks died, could I just buy another, use the backup, and run raid again with no data loss?

I personally wouldn't bother with RAID 0 for anything other than to learn and tinker around with RAID with. SSD's are so much faster and cheap these days.

Not to step on some toes here, and sorry if I am too late to the party and you have moved on, but my job in life is specifically storage. I work for the SAN team for the State of Michigan's Tech Services department. I strongly suggest listening to acascianelli. If you are looking to dump money on getting an extra drive or two, and speed is what is important, do not RAID on your home PC, at least do not RAID your main drives. Spend the money on getting a 250gig SSD (this will be as much a another 1TB HDD) to house your OS and games you play, RAID 1 (or if you want the full space, RAID 0) the 2, 1TB drives after that, if you want, though there is no real purpose.
BTW, as stated, redundancy and back up are not the same. You don't care (or have the requirements to meet) about redundancy, you want back up.

 

[terminator363]

I ended up doing Raid 5 last month and absolutely love it

 

[Rallywagon]

You may love it, that weighs little on needing it though. For a home PC RAID is an expensive overkill if you have no need for it. a main hard drive, with a back up is all that is needed. As was also mentioned, depending on the mobo and how it is set up to handle RAID, it may end up making the system slower overall. If this isn't a server of some sort, RAID is overkill at best. For a gaming system, it will just slow you down by adding more overhead. The best option is to use an SSD as the main drive, even 15K rpm SAS drive cant perform near the I/O speeds that a SSD will. RAID has its purposes, almost all of them are corporate minded.

 

[Grayfox]

You may love it, that weighs little on needing it though. For a home PC RAID is an expensive overkill if you have no need for it. a main hard drive, with a back up is all that is needed. As was also mentioned, depending on the mobo and how it is set up to handle RAID, it may end up making the system slower overall. If this isn't a server of some sort, RAID is overkill at best. For a gaming system, it will just slow you down by adding more overhead. The best option is to use an SSD as the main drive, even 15K rpm SAS drive cant perform near the I/O speeds that a SSD will. RAID has its purposes, almost all of them are corporate minded.

The only reason I have a RAID is for back ups of games, movies and PC imaging.
I also sick of having multiple HDDs connected I had 3 externals at one point, each taking a power plug from the power board.
This way I have 12TB in one package and I love it.

 

[Rallywagon]

The only reason I have a RAID is for back ups of games, movies and PC imaging.
I also sick of having multiple HDDs connected I had 3 externals at one point, each taking a power plug from the power board.
This way I have 12TB in one package and I love it.

I'm pretty sure he was talking about internal drives here. There are apps for windows 7, and natively on windows 8-10 you can pool all hard drives connect to your system, without the overhead of RAID. RAID is great, on storage or media servers or in data centers. But on a typical home PC, its a bit like putting a NASCAR V8 into your daily driver. Oh sure, its cool to look at, and sounds BA, but then you have to actually drive it to work. And some people might like that, but most people won't.

Now, with all of this said, maybe we are going about this the wrong way. @terminator363 I revise my first opinion, and now suggest, that in addition to the SSD, which is very highly recommended for any gamer, go on amazon or eBay, find a dell poweredge 2950, and use that as your storage. They are cheap, we got a chassis for $50 off eBay, that was with the mobo, fans and PSUs. Processors and ram are cheap for it to, and it is scalable, so you could do an inexpensive setup with a processor and 2gigs of ram. Set it up as a NAS server and good to go. That would probably cost under $100 bucks. We run a Gen II and a Gen III in my basement for storage and gaming servers. They aren't the most robust, but its good enough to run a well modded Resonant Rise server without to much issue, and we can still upgrade our processors.