Best way to setup HDD's and SSD's...?

[ctark 1983]

So a bit of background:
 
I have 4 WD Caviar Black 1TB's.
I have a 256GB SSD.
Currently I have Win7 installed on the SSD, and it's working quite well.  I probably want to leave the OS as it is, and just change the storage drives...
 
 
I used to use 3 of the Blacks in a raid 5 array, as my main HDD (aprox 1.7TB Usable).  All the program files and windows files 'n shit are still on there, along with my main torrent 'downloads' folder (it's about a 950GB folder).
So this raid 5 array is full, I have 3GB's free.  What I want to do is format it (I have backed up all the important files (or so I think, if not, oh well)), and redo the setup of the Blacks.
 
What I want to use it for:  Torrents (Music, TV, Movies ect), Steam Games, and other General Storage.
 
What I want to know is:  What arrangement should I use?
I was considering getting a 4TB internal, and using it as a backup, doing say incremental backups either every night, or once a week (during the night).
This could work well if I put the 4 blacks in a raid 0 array, and get some massive performance gains from it, and not have to worry about data lose, as I only loose a few days at worst.
 
Another thought was a raid 10 array, thoughts?
 
One last thing, my MOBO is the EVGA E760 (x58 Classified).  It has support for:
Six Serial ATA II connectors from south bridge with support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, and RAID 5
Two Serial ATA II connectors from JMicron’s JMB363 with support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, and JBOD
Two Serial ATA II connectors from JMicron’s JMB362 (one rear panel port for eSATA, one onboard connector) with support for RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD

[Swed 2651]

Calling Drizv

[ctark 1983]

Calling Drizv

 

best way to set up

1) enable trim on ssds

2) use GPT partitioning

3) format with XFS

4) enjoy speed and reliability

Yes use XFS cause windows will work really well with it.

[ElectronicDrug 7496]

RAID 5 again imo.

 

Or RAID 0 + nightly backups to 4tb. Depending what you wanna spend.

 

You could also buy another 1tb and do RAID 6. (edit nvm you dont have support for raid6)

[centran 4457]

Considering you probably bought those drives all at the same time and they are from the same batch... Raid 1 cause they all going fail around the same time.

[ctark 1983]

Considering you probably bought those drives all at the same time and they are from the same batch... Raid 1 cause they all going fail around the same time.

 

One is from an external, when my friend broke the connector the usb cable attaches to, one was RMA'ed about 6 months in, when it was having intermittent failures, and 2 are orig, same batch probably.

So ya, the MTBF is probably pretty low on at least 2/4 (probably closer to 3/4) of the drives.  So there is that point to keep in mind.

 

The reason I haven't automatically done a raid 5 is because I don't see that much of a speed increase from what I would expect with a 3 Black raid 5.

The reason I haven't automatically done a raid 0 + backup is because I don't know if I will actually need the speed that comes with 4 raid 0 Blacks, and if that speed is worth the huge MTTR if one or more drives fail.

And I have honestly never used a raid 10 setup.

[ZachPL 1754]

raid 10 is overkill

[MrCoolness 547]

Do raid 10 and post pics

 

Don't do Raid 0 it's a nuisance and you have enough harddrives to run Raid 5 so it's pointless too.

Either listen to driz or centran or just raid 5 it and enjoy it's still fast and you'll probably spend more time configuring it than all the years of the tiny time saved that it accumulates to.

[ctark 1983]

So I decided to try out a Raid 10.  Just won't get rid of my backups, if I don't like it, I'll change it over, buy a 4tb backup drive, and then do a 4 disk raid 0 with nightly incremental backups or something.

 

Also I was out of space again, and couldn't download anything, so I kind of had to do something.

Drives currently initializing, I'll try to do some tests, see what speeds I get on it once it does.

[driz 2626]

im about to show him my setup

[ctark 1983]

im about to show him my setup

 

Jesus, and a nice setup it is.  I think I will be combining ideas from above, and driz's current setup, as, to be honest, his does everything I want, and it works.

[B-cock #1 641]

I personally won't do RAID w/o a proper hardware RAID card, doesn't seem like it would be worth it otherwise.

[driz 2626]

I personally won't do RAID w/o a proper hardware RAID card, doesn't seem like it would be worth it otherwise.

this is actually what i told ctark aswell, i also mentioned the cost of a decent hw raid card is a bit high. i use disk mirroring in vmware on my servers (which include my nas) to get a backup of my data. (i also have a script to store my shit on google drive)