Quote Originally Posted by halo112358 View Post
Thoughts on RAID-50 and 60?
Implement if you have the cash

Really though, it depends on what your budget is and what your goals are. If I may be so bold as to make assumptions about your budget, since you need to buy a minimum of 6 drives and a hardware controller to get it set up I expect you won't be buying SSD's. I'll further suggest that because of the enormous storage capacity of even relatively inexpensive platter-based hard drives you wont be using a fraction of the resultant storage capacity. As a result, I guess I would propose the question: "Do you require a parity RAID level, or would it be equally/more effective to just buy a single, large hard drive to regularly backup full drive images to?" (though you may plan to do that in addition).

The question comes around because a lot of people don't really need parity-based RAID levels for home solutions. Most people can stand to have a longer wait when a drive fails, and if they can it is often cheaper (for the same performance level) to simply perform regular backups. At the same time, it is on occasion more effective than RAID solutions because it does offer protection against viruses, some corruption issues, etc.

I guess on a bit of an aside as far as the parity calculations go I should also mention something I had only previously touched on in the guide but did not go in depth on at the time of writing. Mostly what I'm thinking about relates to the increasing read/write speeds of drives and the new, extremely low access times offered by SSD drives - as read/write speeds have effectively more than doubled over what was available even 1 year ago (high-end SSD vs. a WD Raptor) and access times have dropped dramatically (same drive comparison), the chance for bottlenecks on hardware RAID cards have increased noticeably. There have been a few new chips made in the last year or two that could probably handle most setups, but I guess what I'm saying is simply make sure to take a good look at the hardware controller you plan to use to make sure it can handle whatever kind of disk you plan on using.