Building RAID System - Help

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LenteSubigo

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So my sister is a photographer and needs to have reliable storage of her historical photo-shoots available. I had recommended that she build a raid system, but of course it took until her first drive failure to come to her sences. I am thinking that it would be best to install her OS on a seperate drive, and only use the RAID system for long term storage. Her performance requirements on this storage should be minimal, it would only be an issue if the load times for opening/transfering pictures became unacceptably long.

I am thinking:
4-6 Port SATA II RAID Controller
3 x 750Gb SATA II Drives

With support for adding 1-3 additional drives to expand storage as she needs it.

Any recommendations for a RAID controller that is reliable and would supply fair/average performance? Any perticular brand (more reliable) of drive we should watch for deals on?
 
RAID is for uptime. Does she really need it? You seem dead set on RAID, but have you considered just setting up a good backup system for her? She might benefit more from that.
 
I don't think what you are looking for is raid but backups. I would suggest timely backups of it all on some long term media (CD-R, DVD-R, something like that)
 
Find a motherboard that supports raid, why'd you want to run your harddrives though some nasty slow PCI slot?

2x750GB Harddrives in Raid 1 (redundancy). She'll only have 750GB of room to save crap on but hey, it makes an identical copy of it on the other disk.
 
DVDr are not a good long term storage

if anything set up a single raid 1 or raid 5 drive for her work.

then use tape / dvd / harddrive storage, combo of all or 2, for hardrive, copy to an HD, dsiconnect, store in good place, same with DVD's, make multiple DVD's

if her photos are this important then she should do it right.
 
colinstu said:
Find a motherboard that supports raid, why'd you want to run your harddrives though some nasty slow PCI slot?

2x750GB Harddrives in Raid 1 (redundancy). She'll only have 750GB of room to save crap on but hey, it makes an identical copy of it on the other disk.
Click to expand...

cause if performance isnt an issue thas 133mb of through put, which would be more then adequate.
 
colinstu said:
Find a motherboard that supports raid, why'd you want to run your harddrives though some nasty slow PCI slot?
Click to expand...
If performance isn't an issue (as was said) PCI would be fine, but even if PCI wasn't enough, it was never mentioned that it was a PCI card being looked at vs PCI-E was it?
In addition, a seperate RAID controller card offers more safety in that if the motherboard dies let's say the replacement doesn't need to use the same chipset(s) because the card can just be used on the new system. (Though that does make you stick with the same manufacturer of RAID card if the card happens to die I suppose)

Other than all of that, a well thought-out backup system would probably be a better idea than using RAID (or use both)
 
What I would probably do is the RAID 5 setup like the OP said, as well as an external hdd or two for backup.
 
colinstu said:
Find a motherboard that supports raid, why'd you want to run your harddrives though some nasty slow PCI slot?

2x750GB Harddrives in Raid 1 (redundancy). She'll only have 750GB of room to save crap on but hey, it makes an identical copy of it on the other disk.
Click to expand...

As someone elce mentioned the OP didn't say that they wanted it in a pci slot. Could be pci-x or pci express. In a home system it wouldn't matter anyway. Hell with 3 drives in raid 5 it wouldn't really matter.

cornfield said:
Software raid that way if your card dies you aren't hosed.
Click to expand...

If you run a raid 1 this isn't an issue.

I would say run a raid 1 and have the data and the os on it. Just make a seperate partition for the data to be stored. Next would be to get a few external hard drives(2 at the min) and setup a backup with them where she can swap them out every few days or every week so she has more then one backup.

If she is a pro then maybe even a tape solution.
 
Tape solutions can run expensive, I'd say use higher quality DVD-rs (HP gold on gold) and youre solid. The oft-feared CD-R / DVD-R rot is primarily due to cheaper blanks, and crappier dyes.
 
Well sounds like to me you are dead set on RAID.
I would suggest automatic backups to an external drive or NAS.
However if you are set on RAID i would not use a PCI Controller they are so slow and cause nothing but problems. I would get a mother board with built in SATA3Gbps RAID capabilities. Some others have mentioned RAID 5, RAID 5 is not a realistic solution for home use, not to mention unless you have a really nice(expensive) controller its going to be awefully slow, and if a drive fails you have the glory of trying to rebuild the RAID from the parity information, just not fun, unless you are a tech person who just loves to mess with your setup I dont recommend RAID.
Take that money you saved on a expensive RAID PCI controller buy a WD Raptor for OS, and two 1TB WD or Samsung Drives and put the 2 1TB drives in a RAID 0 for Redundancy, this wont prevent any type of accidental deletion or user errors but will save your files in case of a drive failure.
I dont reccomend RAID to any of my friends, and yes i know i use RAID and sometimes I feel like a hippacrit but I get just a slight performance boost from mine and if something were to happen i have a backup solution and can restore my system to the state it was at the previous day.

Again I cannot stress how much better a solid backup solution would be but if you want raid thats my 2 cents
 
nitrobass24 said:
and put the 2 1TB drives in a RAID 0 for Redundancy, this wont prevent any type of accidental deletion or user errors but will save your files in case of a drive failure.
Click to expand...
Redundancy? I think you got your raid knowledge mixed up. ;) You mean RAID 1
 
I'd recommend against using RAID as a backup strategy for data that unique, or for any data, period. When you're considering data that unique, the pain and suffering ahead is compounded.

RAID is good for availability, not security- just ask anyone who has had a power supply failure, lightning strike, house fire, or had a water pipe burst. Buy space from google, amazon, rsync, et. al., and go off-site. There are literally thousands of good places with cheap rates to choose from. When you factor the cost of the drives and hardware obsolescence over a ten year period, the off site solution is likely to be at least a third cheaper.

Also, who is going to keep maintaining her hardware setup? You're not going to want to mess with that five years down the road.
 
nitrobass24 said:
However if you are set on RAID i would not use a PCI Controller they are so slow and cause nothing but problems.
Click to expand...


Um, no they dont, sure if you buy some cheap ass $50 one, but i have a Promise 4310 and and adaptex PCI based cards and they have been working flawless for over a year.

the interface doesnt matter , PCI / PCie, PCI-x is the quality of the card that matters.

as said not everyone needs a 50 disk raid 50 array, so the 133mb max through put of the PCI bus is more then adequate, epecially if only running a 2-3 disk raid 1.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Ya but if the OS dies, then youre really hosed!, a virus or something, there it goes, a virus cant screw a proper raid card.
Click to expand...

No, you're not "hosed" at with software RAID, either. A virus, dead OS, or whatever else that doesn't touch the actual RAID data is a non-issue. Reinstalling the OS, or booting from a LiveCD, will let you use the RAID.

I think the OP is MIA. Has anybody seen him?
 
FWIW, here is the solution I use:

- OS/data on a RAID 0 array (RAID 0 'cause I can!)
- A data drive that I back up to at least once a week.
- Back up of important data, etc. to DVD's at least once a month.

That gives me 3 copies of everything. Simple, but effective. One may debate the loss of data of 1 week or 1 month, but then I am not a business that requires nightly back ups of company data.
 
Doesn't software raid use your computer's resources? Vs a hardware raid that runs off the chip.
 
colinstu said:
Doesn't software raid use your computer's resources? Vs a hardware raid that runs off the chip.
Click to expand...

Software raid will use some of the system's resources for parity calculations and whatnot. But on anything greater than say a p4 2.0, and you will not notice the slow down. Hardware Raid offers other advantages, such as upgradable RAM slots, flashable firmware, etc.

But I would like to echo what a few others in this thread are saying, RAID is not about backups. And any serious (true) RAID5 controller will cost you a pretty penny. Most RAID systems often have a more expensive controller than all the harddrives in the array itself. The controller is the serious part in any RAID setup. There are many other, more robust, cheaper backup solutions than RAID.

Besides RAID is for e-penis, and you said this was for a female.
 
Ok, I agree, a backup strategy would be better, especially considering RAID would proivde no protection from virus corruption of her image files. The question then becomes how can I setup a backup strategy that maintains 2 copies of the data from the moment she downloads the images from memory cards to her PC?

The backup strategy would need to handle:
1. Memory Card is downloaded to PC, Backup data before erasing memory card.
2. Current Weeks files on local PC, and Temporary Backup (small <100GB)
3. Files older then one week moved to permanent backup 1&2, removed from local PC and Temporary Backup.

Currently she is using about 1TB of disk, so minimally the permanent storage should hold 1.5TB or 2TB and be expandable to hold more data.

I assume it would be best to have the backup disks powered down when not being written to, or restored to extend drive live, and prevent a virus from having access to the backup?
 
LenteSubigo said:
I assume it would be best to have the backup disks powered down when not being written to, or restored to extend drive live, and prevent a virus from having access to the backup?
Click to expand...

Thats a subject of much debate, as powering on any device is when the most stress occurs, ie a bulb burns out only when flicked out, they dont burn out spontaneously. But if you are going to be accessing the disks just once or twice a month, I would store them powered down, in an ESD bag.
 
Because it sounds like this data is very important and worth some $$, i'm going against what others are saying.

If she currently has 1TB of files and can reasonably expect to need 1.5 TB soon (1 to 1.5 yrs), I would go RAID 5. It sucks to get data off of backup. But it doesn't appear that she need the speed of HW parity calculation. Instead of buying a $500 raid card, use the $$ to get the Intel Matrix RAID or the nVidia RAID solution with 3 1TB drives. I think I read that they provide a read speed 200MB/s, and a write speed of 20MB/s.

Then just in case something happens to her home (burglarized -happened to a friend, fire, virus, disk failure-happened me 4times), you should have a similar array at your home (hopefully not the same one) to prevent the data loss. These should auto sync every few hours over the net.
 
Just get her a $100-150 exterior USB hard drive that comes with daily backup software. That covers hard drive failure, mobo failure, OS failure. K.I.S.S.

You're on the wrong track with RAID and are probably way over her head with it, and maybe yours too. Business is business, and backups are what she needs, not RAID.

/toughlove
 
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