Anyone run a parallel RAID setup with 2 SSDs?

[stilly]

My plan is to get 2 SSDs and plug them into either an Asus M85A78L-M LX board or into a controller.

This is going to be for the C:\ so that it is nearly bulletproof when it comes to operating.

The goal is to create a computer that will continue to operate even if the main hard drive goes down (or in this case, one of the main hard drives) so I figured that running 2 drives in a parallel format should be good without being overly expensive.

Part of the issue that sparked this was a computer that somehow got corrupted and now throws out CRC errors when trying to move the PST file from the C:\ to a new disk. I can not copy it, I can not even Xcopy /C it.

Unstoppable coppier I think started to do good, but it got bogged down.

It does not help that the PST file is a 4.29GB file but at least the corruption seems to start at the 4.09GB mark.

Damn though, it is like someone jammed an icepick through the hard drive and it caught this file and stuck it there. It can NOT be copied fast. Anyways.


Just curious if anyone else has done this I forgot I think it is RAID 1 that I am going to setup. Anyways...

[incredablehefey]

I have not done it and i dont really see the need but if it makes you happy. http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/...vels-tutorial/
I purchased one of these the other day for $97otd to my doorstep.

[ke6guj]

I did a RAID1 SSD setup for my manager's PC, mainly for S&G's. I don't recall the metrics but it doubled performance on one side of the R/W equation. make sure that your RAID card supports TRIM or you'll be burning out those SSD cells soon.

[ocabj]

What do you mean by parallel format? If you mean mirroring, then that's RAID1.

The performance degradation of RAID1 on SSDs should be negligible.

With regards to that copy failure on a 4GB+ PST file, are you sure you're not trying to copy it to a FAT32 filesystem? The file size limit is 4GB

[ke6guj]

yup, if tryiing to copy out to a external drive (spinning or flash), very well may be formatted FAT32.


just found my pics, went from 269MB/read, 255MB/write on a single SSD, to 566MB/read, 263MB/write. basically doubled the read I/O, which was expected. no practical reason he needed an SSD RAID1 array other than he could.

[Satex]

Just curious if anyone else has done this I forgot I think it is RAID 1 that I am going to setup. Anyways...

A RAID array with SSDs is a waste of money. With traditional drives, mechanical failures can occur at random - completely killing a hard drive. Since SSDs are not mechanical, bad blocks is the issue and total electronic failure is much lower from a probability perspective. All modern hard drives handle bad blocks elegantly and transparently to you. I wouldn't bother with a SSD based RAID1.

[Vagabond]

A RAID array with SSDs is a waste of money.

Right up to the point when it isn't. Nothing wrong with a bit of redundancy. Everything fails.

[71MUSTY]

A RAID array with SSDs is a waste of money. With traditional drives, mechanical failures can occur at random - completely killing a hard drive. Since SSDs are not mechanical, bad blocks is the issue and total electronic failure is much lower from a probability perspective. All modern hard drives handle bad blocks elegantly and transparently to you. I wouldn't bother with a SSD based RAID1.

Then you would laugh if you ever saw my server. Combined Raid and mirroring. I set of raid drives mirrored onto the next set. Then backed up onto a matching configuration and again into the cloud.

Because some data you just can't replace.

Is it way overkill? Probably, but it was my money protecting my lively hood. And Dell didn't mind building it for me.

New technology probably makes it obsolete but whatever.

[stilly]

I will address everything.

This started because of a Modern SEAGATE CONSTELLATION ES 500GB Hd.

If you are not familiar with a Seagate Constellation drive, it is an enterprise class drive that is supposed to be able to be ran 24/7 365... As opposed to
desktop which is 8 hour days with the weekends off... I have always ran Constellation ES drives when I could. But now, a drive that is just 1-2 years old got data corruption and even my HD Tune program told me that it had FAILED the CRC portion of something even though it was giving me a green GOOD for SMART testing. There is certainly something wrong with this drive.

For me when my system goes down, I have to deal with it and there is nobody that I can call because it is my system. But since I built this other system for their law office now I have a pissed off lawyer because she has been without a computer since Tuesday and I have been trying to get windows XP to repair itself and fix everything and this thing just snowballed into a huge SNAFU.

I admit this is my fault. I should have pressed her to let me upgrade her to Windows 7 a year or two ago, but there were thigns that she did not have and this and that and we would not be able to reinstall things and yeah anyways, I was able to use this incident as a reason to move her to windows 7 and put her on an SSD, but in the event that her new system gets a hd/ssd that takes a dive, I do not want it being my fault again. She already compared apples to oranges and was pissed that she had lemons... I told her that things go bad and this was not the norm, but you know the way that non computer people are. Getting mad at me and telling me that this would never have happened if she went to staples and bought her computer there is not only far from true, but it does not do anything but piss me off so since I have an opportunity to build a more durable system, then I am gonna do it.

Now that I am back, I picked up 2 EVO 850 120GB drives and a controller, but I am wondering if I should use two SSD drives in a RAID 1 configuration or if I should use my ICYdock and use 4 10k SAS drives at 80GB each in a RAID 10 setup...

Trim is apparently not an issue with RAID, well, for running two little SSDs as a main drive TRIM should not be an issue, but maybe the controller supports it, I hafta look.

I have a 320GB external HD that I just tried to copy it the 4.29 GB file to. I think this HD is NTFS formatted. I store all of my boot disk images on it so I have several large images as well. It should be NTFS. I just checked and ALL of the drives are NTFS formatted...

Before trying to copy it to an external HD I tried to copy it to another partition that was NTFS in the same HD, It failed to go. There was always a CRC error. When I even tried to copy NUL it still failed to read the file due to a CRC error. I used chkdsk /f when in windows but it failed to fix it. At this point I just want to copy that file OUT of the HD so that I can work on it elsewhere but that is proving to be a task. I can move it around on the same partition, and I did, but it will NOT let me copy and unstoppable coppier has failed to do it fast. I think it can do it, but at 20-30 seconds per 4 byte cluster, I fear it will take a while moving that last 200MB over.

I DID let a program from stellar phoenix start working on it and apparently it WAS fixing things, but it got stopped before it could finish because she decided to change the settings so she could see them better with windows 7 that I had installed...

So yeah. Anyways. Thank you for the input. I looked around and saw that some people thought it was good and some thought MEH but if this gives me another layer of security or at least can allow this computer to work before until I can get a replacement drive or with minimal downtime, then it will have done its job.

Do these things have utilities that will monitor and tell you when the array is about to fail or how it is performing or looking?

Oh, it looks like Unstoppable coppier copied an error free file (4GB anyways) onto the other partition that I just 7zipped and put onto a flash drive to bring over here and run under stellar phoenix.

I like the idea of a RAID 10 setup so I think I will give her the 4 SAS drives that are 72GB each along with the SAS backplane. I will load up windows onto that and see how it goes. Then I will give her a new storage drive to store backups on.

I am running photorec right now on her drive to search out any firefox bookmark pages. :\

[ke6guj]

man, you are making this way too complicated. I would not be building systems for a vanilla customer. buy DELL, HP, etc, get a good warranty and be done with it. Any hardware issues and you call support and have them repair/replace it. customer complains about the system and you blame DELL. you build a custom system for someone and you own it forever. anything goes wrong with it and it is your fault.

what is this customer doing that requires a custom system? I'd buy a couple couple i3 or i5 boxes from DELL for ~$500 each and call it done.

As for XP computers, I had a couple people that wanted me to support XP after it went EOL. that was so nice to be able to tell them that they had to upgrade or else I could no longer help them. that let me fire a couple cheap-*** customers that I no longer wanted to support.

I would prefer doing better backups than relying on RAID (remember RAID is not a backup solution). perhaps get a nice NAS box and store your backups there. remember, in-chassis backup, even on a separate drive is not recommended. many NAS systems like Synology have built-in backup/sync software that may be good enough. you might want to do disk-image backups but I normally just recommend just backing up your data. I can rebuild/replace a computer and then just copy the backed up data onto the new computer.

If I have a drive image, but need to replace the computer, then I have to worry about imaging to dissimilar hardware (which isn't impossible with some imaging software solutions) but then adds in extra kludge that your new computer will be forever saddled with. so, in that case, I'd be opening up the image and just copying out the relevant data files.




if you don't want to have an off-site component to your backup strategy (copying to cloud or sneakernetting USB drives off-site), then look at the IOsafe NAS boxes, they are fireproof and waterproof. gives you some disaster protection even while residing on-site.




and finally, to comment on part of your OP. PST files, oh how I hate them. how is the client doing email? can you migrate them into a better email solution? Office365 works great with Outlook. 50GB mailbox hosted in the cloud. OST file on the computer. computer crashes, oh well. link a new computer to the mailbox and all the mail is DL'ed to the new box. smartphones sync with the cloud server as well.

if you don't want to go Office365, there are other IMAP options that would work. and you can still export PST backups on a scheduled basis for offline backups.

[e90bmw]

A RAID array with SSDs is a waste of money. With traditional drives, mechanical failures can occur at random - completely killing a hard drive. Since SSDs are not mechanical, bad blocks is the issue and total electronic failure is much lower from a probability perspective. All modern hard drives handle bad blocks elegantly and transparently to you. I wouldn't bother with a SSD based RAID1.

I agree.
I'd go with a traditional raid with 4 regular drives and have a spare or two laying around.
Much better capacity for the money.
That is what I do.
If I was doing SSD, I would just use one and backup regularly.
I also do this.

[elx144]

If you're going for speed use RAID-10 if you want reliability use RAID-5 or RAID-6. Just think that RAID-10 is RAID-0, no redundancy, except striped across two RAID-1 arrays. So if you lose one of the arrays all your data is gone. RAID-5 or RAID-6 handles multiple failures and you can replace disks that fail.

[Merc1138]

A RAID array with SSDs is a waste of money. With traditional drives, mechanical failures can occur at random - completely killing a hard drive. Since SSDs are not mechanical, bad blocks is the issue and total electronic failure is much lower from a probability perspective. All modern hard drives handle bad blocks elegantly and transparently to you. I wouldn't bother with a SSD based RAID1.

In a normal workstation going beyond RAID 1, yes it's a waste. If you think SSD's don't fail... lol. Bad blocks are definitely not the only issues SSD's have. They've certainly gotten better as controllers have matured over the past couple of years but they're still far from perfect.

I agree.
I'd go with a traditional raid with 4 regular drives and have a spare or two laying around.
Much better capacity for the money.
That is what I do.
If I was doing SSD, I would just use one and backup regularly.
I also do this.

Only makes sense in a scenario where you actually need the capacity. The low access times even on the older SSD's still trumps HDD's for application performance, even mundane things like outlook.

man, you are making this way too complicated. I would not be building systems for a vanilla customer. buy DELL, HP, etc, get a good warranty and be done with it. Any hardware issues and you call support and have them repair/replace it. customer complains about the system and you blame DELL. you build a custom system for someone and you own it forever. anything goes wrong with it and it is your fault.

what is this customer doing that requires a custom system? I'd buy a couple couple i3 or i5 boxes from DELL for ~$500 each and call it done.

As for XP computers, I had a couple people that wanted me to support XP after it went EOL. that was so nice to be able to tell them that they had to upgrade or else I could no longer help them. that let me fire a couple cheap-*** customers that I no longer wanted to support.

Pretty much. Under no circumstance would I build a system for anyone but myself(with a couple of exceptions), as sending them off to any of a number of other companies with a support infrastructure is worth avoiding future headaches that will happen(if they weren't going to happen, then the user wouldn't be asking you to assemble a computer in the first place).

[stilly]

Yeah. I am kinda regretting that I took her on as a customer. I should have let her go to staples and buy her own computer...

But now I got to thinking that I might be able to build and market stronger machines within her group. Another lawyer contacted me looking for two computers as well. I have a good source, but if I can modify them to each have a contained RAID setup with a raid 5 or 6 then that would be sweet, and I could charge a lot more money for it since it is a bit more work.

As it is now though, I can not even get any of my SAS drives to register in the ****ing BIOS so instead of a Raid 10 with 4 drives I will have to settle for a RAID 1 with those two 850 evos I think. Do I have to do anything different for a SAS drive to turn on or be seen by the BIOS?

Anyways, she is a trial lawyer and she does not want ANYTHING to do with cloud backups. She does not trust the cloud with her client information.

As for the network, okay, I installed her network some time ago, about 2 years actually. I gave them a NAS using NAS4FREE and a home built generic box with the minimums (she was just starting out and could not afford much).

Anymore computers she needs I will point her towards other places, but I took on the work because I needed the money so I did not want to turn anything down.

My goal here is to be able to build a system that can hopefully tell the user that it needs a new HD because one is down instead of just BSODing and making me stop what I am doing to go out there.

She uses Outlook 2010 professional so I am going to get her that again or office 2013. Either way, she is my customer and she might be a PITA at times, but at least she is not a cheap PITA.

There is no cloud storage. As a trial lawyer, she said she does not want any of that info in "the cloud" so she wants everything onsite.

I need to figure out a better backup solution though since I have another computer on her network making backups of the NAS but I noticed that it did not have any data backed up yet so I gotta look into it.

Cobian 11 was supposed to connect to the NAS and copy the public folder but it failed to do that. It just skips it and does nothing so all of the backups are empty... :\

[ke6guj]

do normal desktop BIOSes even support SAS? I've only seen SAS connected to a RAID controller, not directly to a desktop MB.

as for not wanting to do cloud backup, thats fine, just work with either hardened onsite backup or set up an off-site backup storage setup via sneakernet to her house, bank safety deposit box or something.

but as for email, its pretty much open game already since it is sent in clear text over the internet before it even gets to her, so that confidentiality is broken already. I know Legal is different from Medical so the regs are different, but Office 365 is HIPAA compliant. and Office 365 is just the email provider, she would still use Office 2010/2013 as the desktop client software.