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Raid 0 on 3x500GB triples your failure rate (especially important on older drives, as I presume these are), and still won't get anywhere near an SSD in speed.
You could just mount the 3 drives separately and have storage that way, which means if one fails you've still got the data on the other two.. it'd still suck but not as bad as losing everything.
If it was me I'd wait until I could afford the SSD.. it'll be many times faster and newer.
I mean it's worth a shot. OP knows that much. If it works out, it'd tide them over until they get a new ssd
I will only use it for game data. I highly value my personal data so I wont put anything remote to worthy in it, I have nas, separate drive, and even Google Drive. If it fails, the worst thing that will happen is I need to redownload all my games from Steam. It will be a bummer, but I think I should be able to restore the first game in matter of hours. My save data will be saved on Steam anyway.
Yeah, single hdd is only around 150mbps, not bad, but I saw 4 hdd can get to 600mbps, which is in realm of sata ssd. I'm just thinking to giving a shot, beside it's only $20. If one fail, I still have 1tb.
Are you accounting for stuff like SATA cables and cradle mounts for the HDDs in your cost calculation?
Im sorry, but, for things like games, raid isn't really going to give you a perceivable speed increase. Most games today get the most use from the random read, where raid does best is with things like sequencial writes (large movies, etc).
Raid0 will add to your throughput, but your seek times will still be the same regardless of how many drives you add to it.
Here in the us, a 2tb ssd is less than 50$. Im sorry its not the same where you are at.
I know the others suggest raid0, but since youre doing three drives im gonna suggest raid 5 instead. You don't lose out on read performance compared to raid0, just write speeds. More importantly, one drive failing wont actually break anything.
As others have mentioned, the sequential speeds in RAID 0/5 won't really help you in gaming. What you might see at best is faster loading times, but that's really about it.
One option which no one else has mentioned is using setting up tiered storage using bcachefs - where your SSD acts like a cache drive, which would contain frequently read aka "hot" data, and the rest of the data would be on your spinning disks. This way, you'd be making the most of your limited SSD space, whilst still taking advantage of the large storage provided by the spinning disks.
The advantage of bcachefs is that all your drives can be part of the same pool and it'll all be transparent to your OS/programs, and all your data is striped like a RAID 10 array, so you can replace your drives in the future without any issues, or any major config changes. Like if you get a faster NVMe drive in the future, you can set that as your "hot" (promote) drive, your SSD as the foreground drive and your spinning disk pool as the background ones and your data will automagically migrate.
Have a quick read of the manual, you'll see that it's actually fairly easy to set up and operate: https://bcachefs.org/bcachefs-principles-of-operation.pdf
The main drawback right now (for you) is that it's not yet part of the kernel. The good news is that it's gonna be in the next kernel (6.7), so you can either wait for it, or use a third-party kernel with bcachefs already compiled in it (I believe linux-tkg is one of them).
Now THIS is what I need.
I think I need to change my plan abit. What do you think: if I buy 2x1TB, use my sata ssd as foreground, and use 128gb nvme drive as promote drive. I still do not understand the difference between background, foreground, ans promote tho. I went back and forth both reading the guide.pdf and archwiki. Still have no idea how they actually work. It's bleeding edge, as no one beside the developer talking about it on youtube.
However, I think I'm gonna use both linux-tkg linux-git as they are available on the aur. Tkg is the Garuda used, no? It is on chaotic-aur, so I assumed so.
Foreground targets are where writes initially go. Data is moved from foreground to background targets while idle or as needed. Data which is read from the background targets is moved to promote targets.
If you set your NVMe as a promote target, SSD as foreground and your HDDs as background targets, all writes would first go to your SSD, then get copied to your HDD during idle, and finally the copy of the data on your SSD will then be marked as a cached copy. In case your SSD becomes full, then it'll store the data on other drives. As for the promote targets, any time you read data from either the SSD or HDD that wasn't on the NVMe, it would get cached to it, so the next read will be faster.
The main point of the foreground vs promote is to prioritize write vs read speeds. If you value faster writes, then set your NVMe as foreground. If you value faster reads, then set your NVMe as promote. Of course, you can also set your NVMe as both foreground and promote to benefit from both faster reads and writes.
But since you plan to introduce an SSD in the mix, you can create a single group for your NVMe + SSD, and a second group for the HDDs, and set your SSD group to foreground + promote, which will simplify things.
The Arch wiki illustrates this well:
A recommended configuration is to use an ssd group for the foreground and promote, and an hdd group for the background (a writeback cache).
Modified example to your scenario:
# bcachefs format \
--label=ssd.nvme1 /dev/nvme0n1 \
--label=ssd.ssd1 /dev/sda \
--label=hdd.hdd1 /dev/sdb \
--label=hdd.hdd2 /dev/sdc \
--replicas=2 \
--foreground_target=ssd \
--promote_target=ssd \
--background_target=hdd
If you're concerned about chucking both the SSD and NVMe in the same group, no need to worry cause bcachefs will automatically prioritize reads from drives with lower latency as mentioned in the wiki.
If they are different speeds, reads for replicated data will be sent to the ones with the lowest IO latency.
But regardless of which setup you go for, main thing to remember is to use the NVMe (or the group containing the NVMe) as the promote target, as that will be your primary cache drive.
Just out of curiosity, where do you live and what hardware are you using? I can buy 2 TB nvme ssds for around $75 usd.
Also as someone mentioned, those hard drives may be used already and could fail. If you do want to try it I'd say go ahead.
I'm an Indonesian, and 1tb of nvme here, used, is $70.
Sorry for not being able to offer insightful feedback. This caused me to look up current prices for 500GB spinning disks and holy shit. Something that used to be barely attainable (for me, then) is so cheap now that I said, “holy shit,” out loud.
Holy shit.. 1Tb drives too..
If only I had a use for them :/
So this is my setup, and it's pretty cost effective. I have two 2Tb HDDs that are striped and one 500Gb SSD that's alone. The games I play the most live on my SSD, any games I'm not really playing live on the HDD. Then I just move my games from one to another. I didn't even have the second HDD for the longest time. I don't bother with using the SSD as a cache anymore. There is no advantage in gameplay to striping a game, however updates and moves are faster.