Non-RAID Options

Sure you want RAID? If it’s just speed you’re after, a single, large SSD is a better investment. No hard drive RAID 0 system will even get close. Of course, you could always add SSDs to your RAID 0, and go nuts, although SATA 3 limits the fun, unless you move to PCIe-based controllers, including the lovely M.2. True maniacs can go RAID 0 across M.2 slots, making read speeds of 3,000MB/s-plus possible. However, for sheer speed, add SSDs to your existing controllers first.

If you just want to use a motley collection of hard drives more effectively, JBOD—Just a Bunch of Disks—might be a better bet than RAID. There’s no redundancy or performance increase, but no capacity loss, either. Your drives are arranged into one logical drive. All you need is a cheap compatible controller card ($30 is plenty). If you simply need more storage, it’s cheaper, and can use up mismatched drives. However, if a drive fails, you’re in the hands of data recovery tools, because the whole lot goes down.

If data security is paramount, then yes, RAID 6 offers it. However, it is no replacement for a proper backup routine. RAID offers good protection if a drive fails in action, and nothing more. It won’t save you from a hack, virus, theft, fire, power spike, or accidental deletion. If you can cope with recovering the data from your last backup after a failure, there’s no urgent need for RAID—just get another drive, preferably an external one, make regular backups, and leave it

at that.