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 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.
Sequential speeds aren’t the only metric for storage performance though. Random reads are quite important and the HDDs will literally be hundreds of times slower than an SSD for random reads. It may be fine for older games if you’re fine with waiting for a minute at each loading screen, but some modern games now require SSDs and that number will likely skyrocket soon.
This is what I do. I have a massive old-school hard drive and I use it for things like Rimworld or various indie games. It's honestly manageable for some more-demanding stuff, but if I try to run anything intensive, I might as well not play it, at all. The old-school drive is great for anything Steamdeck level or below, basically.
agreed. games read a lot of random data. performance won't be nearly as 'good' as op expects.
the difference of $50 matters that much for op, i think that not spending anything would be the more prudent choice.
that said, if it were me i'd raid-0 two of them and keep the third as a single drop-in replacement for when that array dies; containing a full backup of the array's contents kept up-to-date with every major patch the games on it gets.
Yeah, I’m mega broke right now, lol. For reference, $50 for average people is around 8 days worth of salary here. And I’m unfortunately, an average people.
In that case a 3 drive RAID-5 is what you want. One drive dies you lose nothing but redundancy. You still get two drives with of data along with parity checking. It isn’t quite as fast as a zero, depending on hardware (most will max the HDD speed before being bottlenecks). Nothing will be as fast for random reads as an SSD or NVME, but you get the storage and piece of mind.
That RAID would be the separate disks. I surely wont use it to be my / or /home disks, it’s too risky. 3x500mb should give me theoretically 300-400mbps of sequential read/write.
I run the latest Debian on a 10 year old Macbook Pro. Linux has given this laptop a second life as a lab machine - it’s still plenty fast enough and it has a really nice screen (Retina) which Debian gets right out of the box with no tweaking. The only thing I needed to do when installing Debian is manually get the drivers for the WiFi hardware during the install (although Debian has the non-free firmware by default these days, they aren’t permitted to distribute all firmware and the WiFi hardware in this machine unfortunately happened to be one of those).
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.
The biggest concern is how much ram and how fast a processor of the older computer. Most modern distros use about a gig of ram on startup and prefer a processor made in the last 20 years. If your computer has 500mb ram and a single core 1ghz pentium its gonna choke trying to run linux mint.
Instead certain Linux distributions are specifically tailored to work on extremely old and underpowered computers such as puppy Linux. These are modern distributions with updated kernels but are extremely minimalist in nature.
Its quick and easy to install a flatpak which is the latest stable which is a godsend when the versions available through package manager are years out of date. Not everyone can compile from source or add an additional source repo. My only big issue is how bloated flatpaks are size wise and where stuff gets installed in my file system.
Old thinkpads are the golden standard of Linux compatible laptops, far superior build quality compared to the crap they put out today. Cheap and durable, if a little outdated in specs. TLP is a popular battery management tool that have specific built integration with thinkpads. I managed to snag a couple thinkpads through FB marketplace pre covid for under 200$ each, my daily driver being a t460 made in 2015. i7 quad core processor, 16gb ram, its weakest link is the Intel onboard GPU. The newer thinkpads let you use thunderbolt 3.0 to plug in an external GPU but there’s a trade off between how new a thinkpad is and its build quality. The old ones could be used as body armor plates and probably stop a 50 cal bullet and boot up fine afterwards, the new ones not much
so what i’ve been doing is finding various models through the generations and researching their cpu’s and oddly enough, nearly every one i’ve put in has had subpar ratings or rankings… idk if that really matters or not
It depends on what you expect your laptop to do. 8gb ram and a 2.4ghz i5 quad core processor is acceptable for almost any computing task out side of playing heavier load video games or specialty IT stuff like LLMs or cryptomining. If your main concern is video games go with the base model steam deck. Also, when you go check out listing for used think pads you will find they contain wildly different specs even if they are the same series. This is because the companies that bought them new X years ago spend some sweet corporate cash on decking them out with the at-the-time highest end options ordered custom from lenovo, and then they throw them in the literal trash a decade later. Some people who dig them out and resell on facebook don’t know a thing about computers and think they are only worth the base options used price.
Glad to have helped you out. Whatever you decide to get, I highly recommend you give Linux Mint a try next. I started with ubuntu, went to mint and haven’t looked back since. Its been my daily driver for half a decade now and has worked absolutely perfectly with every laptop and desktop ive ever owned. My elderly parents use mint without issue every day.
A quick cheat sheet for understanding computer spec lingo:
Ram:
4gb = bare minimum
8gb = pretty good
16gb = awesome
Intel CPU cores:
duo/two cores = bare minimum
quad core/four cores = pretty good, most common
more = awesome
Intel CPU processor
i3 = bare minimum
i5 = pretty good
i7 = awesome
Intel CPU processing speed measured in gigahertz ghz
2.x ghz = average
3.x ghz = awesome
hard drive
HDD = Slower and more limited lifespan but ok, tends to be higher storage space than SSD for cheaper
SSD = Faster and much longer lifespan, usually only goes up to 256GB but its possible to find 512GB. More expensive than HHDs
Harddrive Storage Space
100GB = bare minimum
256GB = average
512GB = pretty good
1TB = Awesome
Upgrading
You can have a computer shop upgrade harddrives to a multi terabyte SSD as well as replace the batteries for you if you do your research and provide it for them.
Another big win for thinkpads is theres lots of documentation on upgrading, and you can order official parts right from lenovo vendors through their website Which is huge for replacing batteries when they degrade to the point of annoyance. Thinkpads have an external battery and an internal one both you can replace to get supposedly about 10 hours of battery life. I get like 3 at this point so I may be considering this option soon. The Linux command TLP can help you get a good estimate on how degraded your batteries are.
I totally love the idea of Fedora Silverblue and UBlue. Played around with Silverblue and perhaps it will replace my Debian installation on my multi media laptop. Still, no substitute for Debian since the kernel is too new/fast changing (problems with VM and I don’t want to pin an old kernel w/o security updates forever) and I have a very custom (but fully automated) setup via Ansible, which wouldn’t work like this on Silverblue. (I would have to use Ansible for the host and then create a lot of custom containers, to the best of my understanding.)
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.
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