Do I need RAID? What should I do to Mirror my 14TB disks?

edo101

Limp Gawd
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Hi guys, I have 4 x 14TB HDDs. I want to use them to hoard data like movies, songs, pics etc. It's soley for backups including PC images. I don't want to buy a box just for them. My computer can handle these HDDs and I'd rather them be in my main desktop given my "on the move" situation.

I had actually set up the first mirror as a RAID 1 pair through my Intel Motherboard. But then I thought about what would happen if I had to replace my mobo and/or if I upgrade my system to maybe an AMD one if they offered the best performance and I realized after googling that it can be tricky. And it seems most people discourage MB RAID.

My question is, what route should I go? SInce these are 14TB drives, I want to mirror their data in pairs since losing 14TB of data is costly. So 2 RAID 1 arrays. I want to keep it as simple as possible and I want to be able to easily move the mirrored pairs to a new system should I encounter a motherboard issue OR do an upgrade.

Another thing is that I have two different verisons of Windows 10 on my machine and in the future it might become dual booting Windows 10 and Windows 11 or doing a triple booting with Windows 10, 11 and a Linux image. THis is why I initially went with a motherboard approach. I figured it would be tricky to do Windows OS RAID when I have dual/tri booting system.

Do I need RAID? Should I find a RAID card and if so, what do you recommend? If not what other routes should I go? I'm open to anythig that's not very expensive.
 
I suggest the low tech approach...no RAID, install two drives, use the other two as external USB backup drives. Periodically connect and refresh the backup drives.
 
Depends on wanted availability and data security

Single disk + backup
Backup is like an old newspaper, always from yesterday or last week, not so relevant for static files like movies.

Raid-1
Allows a disk failure without dataloss or time consuming restore from backup

additional demands
There is a phenomenon called bitrot. This is datacorruption over time with a statistical occurance.
More errors on larger disks or after a longer time. You need realtime checksums and raid with autorepair on reads to be protected

Data/Raid corruption due a crash during write
Only newer Copy on Write filesystems offer protection against (btrfs, ReFS, ZFS)

Read only versioning with snapshots
Gives access to a former data state (last hours, last days,weeks/months/year. You need snapshots, many, up to hundreds
Helps also against Ransomware
 
Another thing is that I have two different verisons of Windows 10 on my machine and in the future it might become dual booting Windows 10 and Windows 11 or doing a triple booting with Windows 10, 11 and a Linux image. THis is why I initially went with a motherboard approach. I figured it would be tricky to do Windows OS RAID when I have dual/tri booting system.

Do I need RAID? Should I find a RAID card and if so, what do you recommend? If not what other routes should I go? I'm open to anythig that's not very expensive.

OS-level RAID is usually done on partitions, not disks. A Linux with its own software RAID would work just fine. You couldn't access Windows partitions in Windows RAID from Linux.
 
I suggest the low tech approach...no RAID, install two drives, use the other two as external USB backup drives. Periodically connect and refresh the backup drives.
This. It's 2023 just say no to raid.

The other option given your criteria of not having a separate nas etc. would be run an OS that offers parity drive protection and VM. Run that with your drives, then run a VM of windows or whatever for daily usage.

I'd still recommend a separate, headless NAS running parity protection.
 
I still like raid. In addition to redundancy the speed goes up somewhere. What's not to like?
 
If you plan on running Windows as you single/Primary OS and you have 4 drives, my suggestion would be RAID6 instead of RAID1. Buy a cheap LSI or Areca SAS RAID Card, and setup a 4 drive RAID6 array. In this situation, ANY 2 drives could fail and maintain uptime. With 2 mirrors, your data can only survive uptime if the RIGHT 2 drives fail (meaning not in the same mirror set), not ANY 2 drives (where you would still maintain uptime if any 2 of the drives in the RAID6 array fail.) You will also get increased read speeds, and with a decent controller you will get better than 1 drive throughput for writes.
 
I still like raid. In addition to redundancy the speed goes up somewhere. What's not to like?
Raid as in raid from your mobo or a raid card, is dead in a sense, sure. raid 1 is okay or raid 10, if it is performance you want, get an NVMe, if it is backup and data redundancy, get your data OFF your main computer, into a NAS and do mirrored raid and follow the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Having some drives in raid on your main computer is not a backup.
 
Raid as in raid from your mobo or a raid card, is dead in a sense, sure. raid 1 is okay or raid 10, if it is performance you want, get an NVMe, if it is backup and data redundancy, get your data OFF your main computer, into a NAS and do mirrored raid and follow the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Having some drives in raid on your main computer is not a backup.

To clarify, I only use OS level raid such as Linux md, ZFS or FreeBSD geom. Never BIOS level raid (shudder) or hardware raid.
 
Raid as in raid from your mobo or a raid card, is dead in a sense, sure. raid 1 is okay or raid 10, if it is performance you want, get an NVMe, if it is backup and data redundancy, get your data OFF your main computer, into a NAS and do mirrored raid and follow the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Having some drives in raid on your main computer is not a backup.


This all the way. And don't skip off-site because of cost. My home server goes to b2. Just under 2 TB in files and family pics, about $2 a month. At least till I retrieve.
 
OS-level RAID is usually done on partitions, not disks. A Linux with its own software RAID would work just fine. You couldn't access Windows partitions in Windows RAID from Linux.
Quite literally everything in your post is incorrect.

The most common array setup in linux is with mdadm, and you generally feed it bare disks.

If you take a windows drive that was mirrored in windows via dynamic disks, you can absolutely pull a drive, mount it in linux via fuse nfts and read the data.

-- Dave
 
SO it sounds like my best option then is to have some sort of folder sync software that can backup my drive to another drive in my PC. I don't want to buy another box right now cause I am in an on the move phase of my life. The less thnigs I have the better. my most important data is in the cloud. The HDDs are for my movies and stuff I can always download again?
 
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SO it sounds like my best option then is to have some sort of folder sync software that can backup my drive to another drive in my PC. I don't want to buy another box right now cause I am in an on the move phase of my life. The less thnigs I have the better. my most important data is in the cloud. The HDDs are for my movies and stuff I can always download again?
Free file sync should work for that.
https://freefilesync.org/
 
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