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Ease of RAID-1 setup?

W

WCES Ryan

Gawd
Joined
Mar 28, 2005
Messages
723
I was thinking of getting a pair of SATA or SATA II drives for a RAID-1 config, as a high reliablity method of storing all of my pictures (I took about 5gb of pics just this Saturday, so 250-300gb for storing them isn't a far fetched idea).

Will this be easy to set up on my system? I am running an Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard, currently with 2 drives, one for system, and one for junk. I wanted to leave that setup alone, and just add the RAID array.

Comments?

Also, are there any drives that are noted as being more reliable than others? I'm trying to do everything I can to avoid a failure and lose all my pictures, which are very important to me.
 
You want a real backup solution, or you want an external drive that you rsync via a cronjob (or whatever WIndoze equivalent there is).

RAID-1 with that onboard SATA raid junk is always a bad idea.

And a bad PSU can kill both harddrives at once. You can make a mistake and wipe out a directory. Etc.
 
He does have a good point. External storage that you backup to occasionally and detach can work well. Probably combining that with RAID-1 and keeping the USB drive off site is your most bullet proof way of doing things. Basically, with nV raid, you just go into the bios and enable raid and choose the SATA drives that you want to participate in it. Then when you boot up next the RAID utility will fire before windows does and it lets you know if it has all the drives and if the raid is ok. Other than that, you just need a windows driver for them to work. Otherwise, you'll see them as two seperate hard drives.
 
i guess the question for the OP is: do you want backup or do you want uptime?
 
I'm not sure what you mean by uptime... I need the data to be reliable, I don't want anything to be lost. Maybe I should be looking for an external hard drive? That's a good point regarding bad power... that's what I would imagine would be the biggest risk to the hard drives, and it would make RAID useless.

How much would tape cost? I haven't looked into it, but I am assuming it would be expensive.

Any other possible solutions?
 
WCES Ryan said:
I'm not sure what you mean by uptime..
Click to expand...
Raid!=Backup. It only gaurantees uptime - if a drive dies, your data is still online. There are many ways that your data can be lost (corruption, natural disaster, wiping out a dir accidentally, virus, etc), having a drive die is but one. Using a drive for offline storage is a good solution, DVDs are as well though it takes a lot of them - but Blu-ray/HD-DVD are coming out.
 
WCES Ryan said:
I'm not sure what you mean by uptime... I need the data to be reliable, I don't want anything to be lost. Maybe I should be looking for an external hard drive? That's a good point regarding bad power... that's what I would imagine would be the biggest risk to the hard drives, and it would make RAID useless.

How much would tape cost? I haven't looked into it, but I am assuming it would be expensive.

Any other possible solutions?
Click to expand...

A tape drive is about 1 K$, but the tapes are expensive and fragile.

For you it is obvious that you should have an external drive and rsync over every day or so.

That way if you fatfinger a command nuking your archive you have a source to get it back.
 
Uptime in this context means how often your data is "available" - you can load it in Photoshop, copy it off to backup, whatever. Raid helps this, because it's got two disks with the same data on it, so it's more likely that one of them will be working at a given time.

But it isn't backup - you can easily delete the whole thing by accident, a virus could nuke it, your nephew (assuming you have one) could decide everyone looks better in bright fuschia and destructively save over the originals. Backup means non-real-time, or snapshots. Stick with an external drive, and if it comes with Retrospect, all the better ;)

 
I run a 150GB Raptor as my boot and OS, I also run 2 Seagate 300GB 16MB cache hard drives as raid 1. On these I store 'My Documents', and all my data. Any non-replacable data is periodically backed up to DVD although I have plenty of spare space ;)

The advantage I can see with Raid 1 is that I get faster read speeds than just one drive because the system can read from 2 drives at once, while having some fault tolerence. Some prefer Raid 0 but unless I wasn't worried about losing everything, I'm not going to go there. Write speeds are pretty much the same speed as one drive. I have 4 DVD writers and I can burn 2 copies of 2 different DVD's at once and 8 - 12x speed ... wether or not Raid-1 helps this, I can only assume so.

An external drive could be an option but I've had them fail too, I figure I might as well get higher read speed as I do quite a bit of video and photoshop work.

It was pretty easy to set up the raid. I had never set one up before, nor had used the Asus A8N32 SLI deluxe bios.... but as I recall it only took 15 minutes... I'm unfamiliar with the Asus Premium bios.
 
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