Raid 1 Speed

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soulman901

Gawd
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Mar 26, 2004
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How quick is a Raid 1 setup. I would almost go Raid 0 but the problem I forsee with that is one hard drive is going to go and whoops, there goes all my data.
Will I notice a huge speed lost if I go with Raid 1?
SoulMan901
 
You *shouldn't* see any impact in performance unless you put two PATA drives on one channel or your controller just sucks.

Why are you wanting to use RAID?
 
Depending on the implementation, RAID-1 should see slightly higher write access times (bad) and slightly lower read access time (good) when compared to a single disk. With a caching controller this may be quite different. Good controllers should be able to use RAID-1 to improve the performance of concurrent data read access, say web or database servers.
 
Because I want to avoid losing any data. There is nothing on the market place for consumers that wish to backup a ton of data without resorting to a cheap raid 1 solution. If you want to backup to tape, you have to pay through the nose.
So say I had a 160Gigabyte hard drive that was full? What do I use to back it up with?
There's nothing out there that can handle that size without doing what I mentioned above. Thus my need for a Raid 1 setup. A Raid 1 is at least safe.
SoulMan901
 
soulman901 said:
Because I want to avoid losing any data. There is nothing on the market place for consumers that wish to backup a ton of data without resorting to a cheap raid 1 solution.
Click to expand...

throwing aside the fact that RAID-1 is not a backup solution:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1030595021&postcount=4

drizzt81 said:
RAID, in whatever form is not a replacement for backing data up. It is used as an uptime tool. At best RAID can protect the user from one source of data loss, physical drive failure. It adds at least one more source of data loss at the same time: controller and driver problems. The system complexity increases, which will increase the likelihood of failure.

There are a lot of ways, many of which occur far more frequently that will cause you to lose your data, even if you run RAID-1. Here's a short list:
  • hitting delete on a file that you did not mean to
  • messing around with a partitioning program
  • Installing a new OS
  • Getting a Virus infection
  • Some program doing something stupid and overwriting a file
  • ...

As such, I advise you to be aware that RAID is not backup. Not even in the farthest sense of the word backup.
Click to expand...
soulman901 said:
If you want to backup to tape, you have to pay through the nose.
Click to expand...
Yes, but there are other alternatives to tape.
soulman901 said:
So say I had a 160Gigabyte hard drive that was full? What do I use to back it up with?
Click to expand...
How about another 160 or larger HDD that is stored off-site or at least in a read-only format, i.e. offline and unconnected?
soulman901 said:
There's nothing out there that can handle that size without doing what I mentioned above. Thus my need for a Raid 1 setup. A Raid 1 is at least safe.
SoulMan901
Click to expand...

yes, there are plenty of synchronization tools that are not RAID. By just disconnecting the backup medium, a large number of data-loss sources are eliminated.
You may want to look at this thread:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1028275039
 
It's only a backup solution to catch hard drives failing. As far as being a true Data Backup, no. But it's currently the cheapest.
The more I think about it, the more I might go a Snap Shot Route.
Thanks for the post on that. That helps me out some of the backup part. I'm still not a fan of Large Hard Drives though.
SoulMan901
 
Like I said. If you have a 500Gigabyte hard drive that is full of data that you want to keep, how do you back it up or keep it safe?

CD/DVD: Would take too many disc's to be effective.
Tapes: Too expensive, the cheapest tape technology only holds in the upwards of 36-72 Gigabytes and it would take at least 7-8 tapes to backup 500Gigabytes.
Raid 1/5: Well this works somewhat but as pointed out it's not a backup method, it's a way to stay up and running. Well I would probably say at least this helps, but any changes you make to the data get mirrored to the other drive(s).

Now if I could use a program to take a snap shot of the entire drive at any given point and then restore from that I would think that is the best method.
I'll probably look into that. Since my Mobo will have an eSATA port on it, I'll probably look into picking up an eSATA Drive Cage, Hard Drive and Software to do this with.
Besides Norton, are there any other commerical products that do the same thing that's not on the cheap side but priced for the consumer?

SoulMan901
 
RAID 1 is your cheapest option. It also has the benefit of immediate recovery...if a drive fails, you can continue working.

If your main concern is performance, the next cheapest option is taking snapshots to an internal hard drive. If you want to be able to take the backup drive with you, go external.
 
soulman901 said:
CD/DVD: Would take too many disc's to be effective.
Tapes: Too expensive, the cheapest tape technology only holds in the upwards of 36-72 Gigabytes and it would take at least 7-8 tapes to backup 500Gigabytes.
Click to expand...

You don't have to do a full backup every time. If cost etc is an issue then consider the following:

First of all, don't back up the software itself. The OS, your apps etc don't change dynamically. You can reinstall these from the original disks and then run the updates (which you can backup or just download from the maker's site). If you buy apps via download, it's a good idea to save the downloaded files to CD/DVD right away.

Next - backup all the dynamic files of significance - config files, data files etc. This will be a big(gish) backup.

Then - only do incremental backups for several weeks (depending on how much data changes) until you do another full backup. Incremental backups will skip all the files that haven't changed since the last backup. This means that incremental backups are small.

For a lot of home users, this will result in rather small backups most of the time - well within the capability of CD/DVD. It will require a bit more housekeeping (keeping track of the order of disks to restore etc), but with good backup software, this isn't such a big deal. Heck, I know businesses (SOHO) that use these techniques efficiently.
 
Michael,
I am not talking about backing up programs. I am talking about backing up 500 Gigabytes of Pure Date (Photos/Music/Documents/Etc)
I understand that it would be a waste of space to backup the applications as they could be re-installed. It's the data that is important.
So right now the only way to backup anything that large would be to ether setup a Raid 1/5 or even for that matter a Snapshot Program to capture the entire contents of a Hard Drive.
Anyone know anything besides Norton that can do that but is commercial?
SoulMan901
 
soulman901 said:
It's only a backup solution to catch hard drives failing. As far as being a true Data Backup, no. But it's currently the cheapest.
The more I think about it, the more I might go a Snap Shot Route.
Thanks for the post on that. That helps me out some of the backup part. I'm still not a fan of Large Hard Drives though.
SoulMan901
Click to expand...

Raid 1 is not a backup solution at all. It is even debatable that Raid 1 is less safe than a single drive.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1157617
 
ribs1 said:
Raid 1 is not a backup solution at all. It is even debatable that Raid 1 is less safe than a single drive.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1157617
Click to expand...

It's drive redundancy, which is pretty much what anything else being talked about here amounts to. If you're going to back up to another internal hard drive on the same system, RAID 1 is a good solution for reducing the risk of data loss. The key is to purchasing a solid RAID controller rather than just using whatever you have at hand. I'll never use an onboard RAID.
 
Why is Raid 1 not even safe at all? One Drive takes a dump, you still have one drive up and running. The only chance that you would have a problem with a Raid 1 solution is if both drives failed.
That post you linked doesn't even mention any issues with Raid 1. Just talks about if you moved the hard drives from one controller to a different controller you would run into issues.
SoulMan901
 
soulman901 said:
Why is Raid 1 not even safe at all? One Drive takes a dump, you still have one drive up and running. The only chance that you would have a problem with a Raid 1 solution is if both drives failed.
That post you linked doesn't even mention any issues with Raid 1. Just talks about if you moved the hard drives from one controller to a different controller you would run into issues.
SoulMan901
Click to expand...

RAID of any level is not backup, and backup is not RAID. They have different purposes.

RAID is for uptime (keep computer running in event of drive failure), backup is for data protection (have data safe in case of corruption, virus, etc.).

To answer your original question, RAID 1 has no real speed penalty.
 
soulman901 said:
I am talking about backing up 500 Gigabytes of Pure Date (Photos/Music/Documents/Etc)
Click to expand...

Do all 500GB of data change that frequently? If not, only the full backups are going to be big. If you are willing to run a full backup only every couple of months, the incremental backups might still be manageable.
 
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