Most efficient use of disk array

Masejoer

Gawd
Joined
Mar 11, 2001
Messages
698
What do you guys propose as the most efficient way to use my drives? I have a lian li v354 system beng built that is a new/larger home server and NAS. While it's a file server, I'd also like to do backups to the server, from my numerous home workstations, better than what I'm doing now (manual).

Should I:

A) RAID everything in RAID1/RAID5 sets

-or-

B) RAID the file server drives but use standalone drives for storing entire drive backups from my workstations

I figure as long as the drives are monitored on the server, it would be quite unlikely that a workstation drive would fail at the same time that a drive fails in the server. My workstation files aren't all THAT important either but I just had another Seagate drive die (this time the motor is having problems) and it's just a huge nuisance to get everything setup again. I lost just e-mail history (not really important although I have had the same inbox move from system to system for nearly 10 years and apparently no existing backups...), browser settings/bookmarks (some a few years old but kept on purpose.), a bunch of virtual machine hard drives that have numerous uses, downloads from Steam, drivers etc for all my systems, and so on. Some license files will be a pain to restore for applications but I can still get them. The failed drive was just reviewed and data updated just last month...

Basically, important files/photos/etc are still backed and timestamped to the server and then duplicated to an external drive but I'd like fairly reliable backups of all my systems' drives in case of future drive failures. Currently I'm down to one Seagate drive as I have two here I need to RMA (again) and the backups being performed are using option B, manually at the moment. I used to mirror the drives on my main system but with dead drives and now having other systems/laptops on hand with a single drive, this isn't a very useful solution.
 
For me, I use RAID 10 for performance, RAID 6 for storage, and RAID 1 for system drives. Basically, I can't be arsed to deal with restores (time to locate the backup, time to restore, risk of actually losing data etc). Of course, that costs more £$. Not sure its the most efficient but that is what I do. WHS version 1 seems to be a good option if you ain't into RAID.
 
For me, I use RAID 10 for performance, RAID 6 for storage, and RAID 1 for system drives. Basically, I can't be arsed to deal with restores (time to locate the backup, time to restore, risk of actually losing data etc). Of course, that costs more £$. Not sure its the most efficient but that is what I do. WHS version 1 seems to be a good option if you ain't into RAID.

I did do this for two years but keep having Seagates fail so I'm ditching what left I have of them. This still doesn't work for all my laptops and umpc computers that can't use more than one drive...

A single copy of the partitions, backed up to a server, makes restoring from a bad drive pretty quick as long as you have an external enclosure and the new drive on hand.

As for downtime at the OS - on a home system, I doubt many people would mirror a couple SSD drives. Backing up to a separate drive also makes sense in this case. Now whether the remote backup has its drives mirrored or single, that's what I want opinions on. I don't want an external drive physically attached to each machine I have.
 
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