RAID 1 vs external Mirroring?

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Mklangelo

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I'll be doing productivity/Gaming @ 60/40 respectively.


I need data security as my main concern but I don't want to sacrifice the performance for my gaming.

I'm thinking about RAID 1 but it's a performance hit on the gaming I may not be willing to take.

Is a viable alternative going with an external drive for serving my purposes? RAID is new to me but the more I learn the more I'm thinking I don't need real time backup. Quick recovery after a disaster is paramount here not necessarily real time protection.

Any input here would be greatly appreciated!

MK
 
No form of RAID is a valid backup scheme. RAID 1 mirroring will not be helpful if anything other than a drive failure occurs. The number of other problems you can experience vastly outnumber a drive failure. Get a nasty malware? It's duplicated on both mirrored drives. Game save with 500 hours of gameplay on it gets corrupted by misbehaving game? It's corrupted on both mirrored drives.

For backup, make images to an external drive.
 
evilsofa said:
No form of RAID is a valid backup scheme. RAID 1 mirroring will not be helpful if anything other than a drive failure occurs. The number of other problems you can experience vastly outnumber a drive failure. Get a nasty malware? It's duplicated on both mirrored drives. Game save with 500 hours of gameplay on it gets corrupted by misbehaving game? It's corrupted on both mirrored drives.

For backup, make images to an external drive.
Click to expand...

Probably tons cheaper as well. Noice!


External it is.

I guess the hands off aspect of RAID was attractive.
 
staticlag said:
External drive as backup.

RAID 1 will not affect you performance at all.
Click to expand...


I don't see how data can be retrieved/written from one HDD at the same speed as it will take for 2 HDD's.

I call BS.

With all due respect, prove me wrong.
 
Mklangelo said:
I don't see how data can be retrieved/written from one HDD at the same speed as it will take for 2 HDD's.

I call BS.

With all due respect, prove me wrong.
Click to expand...

There is nothing stopping the OS from writing the same data to 2 or more drives at the same time. As for reading most implementations only read from 1 of the drives in a raid1 even though raid could make reads faster by using each copy most implementations do not do that.
 
Keep in mind while RAID1/5/6 isn't backup it is uptime protection, and since this is a productivity machine if you'd rather be able to keep working in the event of a HD failure and wait for your new drive overnight from amazon, and then only having to shut down long enough to swap drives, or if you have hot swap bays not even having to shut down at all just pull out bad drive and stick in good instead of having to run to the local computer parts store while your computer is hard down and sitting around waiting to restore from backup and hope you didn't lose too much from between when you last backed up and the drive failed, then RAID1 is still a great choice in addition to an external backup. You still need the external backup but if the personal cost of a loss of a day or two worth of work due to work lost since last backup + time to recover from backup is more than the cost of a second drive for RAID1 then you should definitely do both.

As far as the speed penalty like drescherjm said the controller can perform both writes at the same time, however there is a small penalty since the latency goes from "however long it took the drive to write the data" to "the longest of however long it took two drives to write the data", on average it isn't THAT much slower.
 
You will lose some performance going with a RAID 1 setup. Not tons but there is some.

As -Dragon- mentioned about Productivity, if it really is a huge concern, should drive your decision. Raid 5 or 6 would give you better overall performance and protect you in the productivity sense that you can stay up and running if you have a physical drive failure.

If you want the utmost speed/reliability regarding up time you would want to Raid 5 or 6 your OS Drive so you have almost no downtime if a drive fails. Then you would want a second Raid 5 or 6 array as your data.

The External Backup is a must since NO raid is a backup.

Depending on your budget of course that will also dictate what you are willing/able to do.

Depending the system you are building this in you may be able to do the OS Array on your motherboards internal SATA Connectors IF it has more than 2. Most, sadly, come with only 2 RAID enabled SATA ports.

Since most don't have more than 2 you may need to look at something like LSI's 9271-8i RAID Controller. It supports SSD's and gives you 8 SATA 3 connections out of the box to build RAID setups.

Raid 5 requires minimum 3 drives.
Raid 6 requires minimum 4 drives.

For the Data Volume the WD RED series drives are an attractive option and are slightly more $ than the Seagate Baracuda's which are also fine.

RAID 6 is a little overkill in my opinion.

If I were to build this configuration I might consider this shopping list:

3 x Samsung 840 Pro SSD's @ $159.99
3 x Seagate Baracuda 3TB HD's @ $137.99
1 x LSI 9271-8i @ $700

optional:
3 x Western Digital RED 3TB @ 157.99
- these are attractive as they are "rated" for 24/7 operation and "officially" support raid configurations, they also have 3 year warranty vs 2 from Seagatte.

It's NOT cheap by any means... $1593.96 based off of www.ncix.com pricing. You can no doubt find the parts cheaper, if you go used or find sales.

This is just an example and a little overkill to some, In fact I know people will chime in and say so.

For a simpler solution, go with your daily backups to an external device.

If your OS is configured the way you like it, make a Image of it. That way you can restore your OS fairly quickly by cloning that image back to a new drive. You would want to update this image periodically, once monthly maybe.

Since your backing up to an offline device, or external you probably don't need to consider raid.

Having 2 backups though that would be a good idea. Using an External is a good solution you can have on site. I'd also consider CrashPlan as an offsite backup option.

Long winded, yes, the point I was making is getting into RAID can be expensive.
 
Alternately, it could just be the cost of one more drive like his current boot drive as pretty much every chipset these days support RAID 1 and many can migrate from single disk to mirror without even needing to reinstall. Going to single drive on MB controller to 6 drives on dedicated RAID controller is absurd when all he wants is a bit of security against a single point failure (and this is coming from the guy planning to get 4x Samsung 840's, 5x WD reds, and a adaptec 71605Q for his NON file-server server)
 
If anything, when you are using a FakeRAID (onboard RAID) controller with RAID1, the read speed will actually increase to about 1.5x the number of drives you have in the array, so programs and other applications should actually load faster.
Though the write speed is still the same as a single drive.

Under software RAID, however, RAID1 does not increase read speed, with the exception of some algorithms under GMirror.
 
Mklangelo said:
I don't see how data can be retrieved/written from one HDD at the same speed as it will take for 2 HDD's.

I call BS.

With all due respect, prove me wrong.
Click to expand...

The data simply writes to both drives simultaneously via the controller or software being used.
It is double the throughput for the chipset, but the data rate for each channel (SATA cable) will be the same as the other.

No slow down will occur.
 
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