Advise on RAID needed

cicobuff · Post by **cicobuff** » Wed Nov 04, 2009 4:15 am

Hi,

I'm thinking of building raid array from my drives but need some advise.

My mobo supports intel matrix raid.
My choices are:
1) Building Raid 1 drives with my pairs of 2x300GB and 2x500GB drives. But this reduces my capacity by 50%!
2) Using Intel Matrix Raid to make a 3x300GB (utilizing a 300GB ?partition? of my 500GB) drive and use the remaining 500GB as well as the 200GB partition as stand-alones. [I am told this is possible with Intel's Matrix Raid].

Now, my concerns are data safety and space efficiency.
I am worried that even with raid 5 using Intel Matrix or any other Raid 5 technology, if my raid controller crashes (in this case the mobo), my data will be unrecoverable.

Am I correct in thinking that raid 5 only offers the appearance of data safety but it's almost as bad as raid 0, since mobo failures are quite common (I have it happening to me about once every 3-5 years depending on the mobo I use)? I am now thinking that raid 1 is the only option for me and I'll have to sacrifice the space efficiency. Is this correct?