2x WD 1TB Blacks, Use both to RAID 1, or use 2nd to backup 1st every week?

GundamF91

Golden Member
May 14, 2001
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Very shortly I'll be adding a second 1TB WD Black drives to my system.

I'm wondering if I should do RAID1 with the 2 drives (with TLER fix). It'll give me immediate back up 24/7 and I also get multi-threaded disk reading, which should help with performance. However, that means I'm stuck with using only 1TB of the drive space.

Another alternative is to use 2nd Black to backup 1st Black, using the Acronis to automatically back up weekly. This probably won't fill up 2nd drive, and I can probably use the non-back up space for some non-essential storage. Also this method would save a backup from a week ago, so it may allow me to roll back to previous image if I had software or virus issues.

By the way, does anyone know that if there's data corruption on 1 disk, how is that handled in RAID1? Does RAID 1 guarantee against data corruption, or simply duplicate the corruption on another drive? (I'm takling about the rare instances where the drive runs fine, just that somehow a small piece of data got corrupted, such as a picture, which could happen on rare occasions).

 

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
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If you only have a single spare hard drive, use it for backups. RAID 1 won't protect against data corruption. The chances of significant data loss are much greater with RAID 1 (or any other form of RAID) than with a backup.
 

Jeff7181

Lifer
Aug 21, 2002
18,368
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As many have said before and RebateMonger has alluded to... no form of RAID is a backup solution. If you're looking for hardware redundancy you want RAID. If you're looking for a backup solution you want to perform real backups.