Western Digital made such bad disk drives they had to make some correctly so that their drives could be used in any RAID configuration. The majority of their drives like to die for fun. Of all of the drives I've purchased over the years, WD have been the most failure prone.

SSDs generally only allow you to write to them 100x their capacity. So if your SSD is 120GB, rule of thumb is you can write 120,000GB (120TB) to it before the drive fails. It averages out at about 3-5 years of usage which is what you're expected to get from a plattered HDD anyway.

Igloo said:

Tbf,

I'd go for a plain sata RAID 5. Put a small partition on for the os / apps and the rest for music / videos.

Most motherboards give you 4 raid ports.

Raid 5 gives you n+1 redundancy. Meaning should one drive go pop, you just replace it and it will resync it's data from the rest of the array.

No downtime if a drive dies. Replace at your leisure (obviously not too long as you are running with no spare!)

Click to expand...

No. No. No. No. NO!

RAID5 is pure evil, on paper it is good, but in practice is is bollocks. Want to know why no manufacture recommends it anymore? Too much data has been lost to RAID5. All it takes is a single error no matter how minor (say a corrupt image of your penis) and the entire array will fail to rebuild.

I have had multiple RAID5 arrays fail to rebuild and have to spend thousands sending the drives off to data recovery specialists to retrieve what they can. You do get the lucky few who've never had a RAID5 failure, but in my world, they are few and far between.

RAID6 is the current standard but many are pushing towards RAID10.

Most mobos don't provide you with 4 RAID ports. What they do give you is slots to plug in 4 HDDs. Very few mobos have onboard RAID, the majority that do only support RAID0 or 1. More often than not you need a RAID card. Server mobos tend to have good quality onboard RAID support, but that is a different ballgame altogether.

Or how about a home server to access all the music over the Internet.

Then have the kit boot of a ssd and as backup have some portable hard drives or use a ruggedised laptop such as the toughbook.

We've had lots of trouble with seagate drives, and a few western digital ones. The ones I use for external video backups now are Freecom Quattros - you can get them in 2TB form, and they have USB 3, Firewire and SATA connectors on. We don't tend to use internal RAIDs any more since we've had 2 fail. It was only thanks to regular backups that we didn't lose loads of work.