Is RAID 0 or JBOD better for home media server?

Posted by Donald Hughes on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Donald Hughes
Published on 2010-04-30T12:50:19Z Indexed on 2010/04/30 12:58 UTC
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I have an external two-bay drive enclosure (the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro) connected to a Mac Mini (my home media server) over FireWire 800. I'm streaming media to other computers in the house over wired gigabit. I have two 1.5 TB drives that I'm using independently right now. The media is on one, and I'm mirroring the files to the other drive at night as a backup. But as I approach filling up the drive I'm wanting to span those two drives together to give me a total of about 3 TB, and then buy another drive for backups. The external enclosure supports both RAID 0 and JBOD, but I'm not clear on which would be better in this situation.

Would RAID 0 provide any performance improvements over JBOD for streaming video (possibly several streams at once?

How does each affect the MTBF of the drives?

In general, should I choose RAID 0, JBOD, or keep them independent?

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