Using A Separate RAID Controller Card

the.ronin

the.ronin

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2008
Messages
508
I just wanted to get some clarification on the benefits of using a separate RAID controller card versus the motherboard controller or software RAID (e.g., Windows 7 mirroring).

I plan on setting up RAID 1 between 2 hard drives purely as a backup solution for files – not for OS redundancy and uptime assurance. The OS (Windows 7 Pro x64) will sit on a separate, single drive.

With a separate RAID controller card:

* If I were to change the motherboard for whatever reason, I can just plug in the controller card and expect my array to be intact.

* If I were to change the OS (upgrade, re-install, etc.), I can expect my array to be intact.

* If one of the drives become compromised, it will alert me after the post screen.

* At any time, I can remove either drive from the array, connect it to another computer and access the files on the drive. (Granted, I may corrupt the original array that way.)

Of course there may be varying degrees of caveats all of these assertions, are they generally accurate?
 
Raid 1 between 2 drives is not a backup. The only thing it protect against is loosing one of the drives. A virus or accidental erase or data corruption will affect both drive and your data will be lost.
 
Very true ... hmmm. Seems to me the best solution is the most straightforward – simply having the 2nd hard drive as a backup drive performing periodic or automatic backups to it separate from the 1st hard drive.
 
Yup, thus the mantra: RAID is not Backup

RAID is for uptime
Backup is for data protection
 
As others have said raid is not a backup. Buy an sata dock. Use one disk in your machine and use the dock to do real backups to the other. Keep the backup disk out of the dock unless you are actually backing up.

Some (all?) versions of Windows 7 have a built-in image backup tool.

Dock: http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?S=1268&ID=1642

That said, I'm a big fan of raid1 myself. I still do real backups though.
 
I appreciate the benefits of having an external drive as backup but, knowing the full extent of my laziness, I plan on leaving the backup drive internal and setting up Windows (7 Pro x64) to do automatic backups to that drive.

Is there a way to hide that drive from the explorer so it doesn’t accidentally get written to?
 
Acronis has a feature called "acronis secure zone" which creates a non-accessible partition for your backups, precisely to avoid accidental deletions. I use it to backup my OS partition onto a second HDD that's always connected.
 
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