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[mkelley]

Sorry if this has been asked before (I did search -- honest!) but I just got my 321 and I'm going to use it as a net share for my WD Live media center.  I have 2 1.5TB Seagate drives I'm putting into it, and ideally I'd just like to see this as one drive with perhaps three main shared folders (the folders will have subfolders).

I see I have at least two options I understand -- standard (for the drives separately) and JBOD (to see the drives as one volume) and I further assume I would just choose the latter for my purposes.  And obviously I don't want RAID 1 (because I'm not trying to mirror the drives).  But what about RAID 0?  Will that also end up being one volume and, if so, is it a better choice than JBOD?  (And, if so, it begs the question as to why anyone would use JBOD).

If reliability is a concern I can live with the two separate volumes, but for convenience it would be nice to just have the one.

[mkelley]

After reading some more here I note some folks don't like anything other than RAID 1, due to possible data loss.  Just to tell those people, I'm not worried about the data (I already have all the data backed up to separate drives).  This is strictly going to be for my media center, to serve those files to it.

Also, someone noted that speed might be an issue (but didn't elaborate on what configuration would give the most speed).  I *do* need some element of speed -- my files need to play at up to 30mbps -- but not a huge amount of speed.  But if JBOD is faster (or slower) than RAID 0 I guess that would be good to know.

So -- I'm still wondering here, what are the pros and cons of using JBOD versus RAID 0 (assuming RAID 0 also makes one volume out of my two drives)?

Ah... I think I answered my own question (not on this board, but a net search).  I see that RAID 0 is actually superior at streaming, and that JBOD really doesn't have anything to recommend for it except that it can combine drives of different sizes together with no waste (not a factor for me since both of my drives are the same size).

Sorry to have wasted anyone's time here -- off to go set things up.

[gunrunnerjohn]

Since JBOD and RAID-0 are both equally likely to lose data, I'd pick RAID-0, potentially better performance.

[bsevern]

Since JBOD and RAID-0 are both equally likely to lose data, I'd pick RAID-0, potentially better performance.

I take it you meant to say you'd pick RAID-1 not RAID-0 which you initially stated is likely to loose data

[D-Link Multimedia]

No his original statement was correct. Both JBOD and Raid 0 are just as likely to loose data and if he is going to use it for media streaming, Raid 0 would be the right selection.

[gunrunnerjohn]

I take it you meant to say you'd pick RAID-1 not RAID-0 which you initially stated is likely to loose data

Actually, I said what I meant, read the original poster's assumption about data reliability.

[mkelley]

Does everyone here think that Raid 0 will give *faster* performance than JBOD?

Just for grins I tried JBOD and while it seemed to work okay there was a *slight* hiccup during one of my high bitstream movies (which never happens when I stream it off my PC's hard drive, through the same network, same hardwired).  I guess I should go ahead and just reformat for Raid 0 and test but it would be nice to know if everyone here thought it might give me slightly better performance.

(And if it makes everyone feel better, I have all this data backed up not only once, but twice, so data loss really isn't an issue.  Honest -- I'm careful with my data).

And while it's OT (but it's MY thread :>) with two Seagate drives the fan came on while formatting and hasn't gone off (even after format was over, although I did copy some data over).  It's been on about 90 minutes now and I'm starting to wonder if maybe I made a mistake on those drives (perhaps I should have gone with the "green" WD drives, because the fan noise on this unit is not really acceptable being on 24/7).

[gunrunnerjohn]

I found that RAID-0 gave me about 20% more throughput than a single drive configuration, but I'm only a sample of one.

You might try a factory default and reconfiguration for the fan issue.

[mkelley]

You might try a factory default and reconfiguration for the fan issue.

Um, okay but isn't that what I've got when I first setup the unit?  Can you point me where that option might be?  (I'm feeling really stupid -- I can't even find out how to reformat this thing.  I *thought* I was reasonably bright but obviously not).

[mkelley]

Well, I did find out how to reformat the drive, so that's not a problem (it's formatting now).

Still a bit peeved about the fan, though.  For those of you who have this unit, does the fan stay on ALL the time? And, if so, doesn't that bother you?  (It's louder than my i7 PC, which is a pretty big beast and has more drives in it).

If not, then do you think it's because I have the two Seagates in there?  I can return them and get WD drives (but because they are "green" I'm a little concerned about performance.  I need speed for my media server).

[mkelley]

Just for everyone's edification here:

It doesn't appear that Raid 0 was the right choice, at least for "raw" disc speed.  At JBOD, I was averaging over 8MBps of data writing, and at Radio 0 I only averaged 7.7.  Not a huge difference, but significant in the long run (I had actually suspected this after doing some research that showed that Raid 0 was slowed by the slowest drive in the system, and that even identical drives could differ by as much as 50%, whereas JBOD did not have this limitation).

Now it may turn out that streaming video to my media server is more efficient -- I sure hope so, because otherwise I will need to reformat (yet once again.  Sigh.).