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I will never build again without RAID!

J

Jerry944T

Member
I just finished my new build, P180 case, E6600 CPU, 2 gigs Crucial Ballistix, Badaxe2 board, EVGA 7900GS KO card, Artic 7 pro cooler....and 2 Western Digital 400 gb hard drives arranged in a Raid 1 Array. Much to my surprise it boots right up! That's always a hold your breath moment.

So I load Vista Home Premium(clean install with an upgrade disc) and all my other essential programs, a drawn out task, bump it up with a mild overclock to 2.95GHZ and start enjoying the machine. Now I don't know why I did this but this is the first time I ever built a Raid unit. I figured I needed to learn a little.

Anyway within the first day a little icon pops up and tells me that one of the hard drives isn't feeling well. The next day on boot up the icon gets a little more strident and tells me one of the drives has failed!!

Wow, thank you RAID, because getting a replacement drive and reloading all the programs would have put a major damper on the whole project. Thank you Newegg for cross shipping the replacement drive. I will slip it in tonight, it should rebuild itself and no blood no foul.

Maybe someone will enjoy my story and maybe push some peops into considering RAID 1. Sure does come in handy!

Jerry
 
Very nice example. I want to do this but am too lazy/cheap to invest in three similar drives. Maybe next year when you can get 500 GB drives for $40.00

🙂
 
Why would you need 3 drives? I'm eager to learn. The way I figured it I would have complete peace of mind, barring a lightening strike:roll:, for the price of a drive.

Jerry
 
RAID 1 with a hot spare || RAID 5 = easier planned down time(If your drives are not front loaded). It's not so common among non-business or non-enthusiasts.
 
What you're describing is as easily accomplished using a drive imaging program and an external hard drive.

Remember, RAID is not a backup solution. 😉
 
You tell 'em Boz, lol. He would not have been able to run his OS until he replaced the drive, which is important for some. What you say is true, and he should take that into account for his most important documents. But for immediate problem avoidance in qualifying circumstances, RAID1 :thumbsup:
 
I'm using an Antec Neo 550 power supply.

BTW the system ran fine with just the one drive. It booted and acted as is normal. At the moment it is rebuilding the new drive. The nice little icon says "A RAID volume is being rebuilt. Data redundancy is being restored."

Granted it's taking a while but I assume at some point they will synch.

I realize that RAID doesn't replace data backup but it sure beats re installing your OS and all the programs.

Jerry
 
Yep, i'm a huge fan of RAID1 or RAID5. Once you go beyond 250gb, and especially 1TB+, it's just insane NOT to. Imagine losing 500GB or 1TB of information?
 
Originally posted by: Looney
Yep, i'm a huge fan of RAID1 or RAID5. Once you go beyond 250gb, and especially 1TB+, it's just insane NOT to. Imagine losing 500GB or 1TB of information?
Click to expand...

I'm a bigger fan of RAID5, even though you're absolutely right about losing a ton of data, its hard to justify the inefficiency of RAID1. Well at least for me. Now if only RAID5 saw more support...
 
RAID 5 + good PSU with plenty of power + UPS + external backup + optical archiving.

The above is what I use on my machine at home. Things I have learned / experienced:
-even RAID 5 can fail (and it sucks when it does).
-don't trust optical data for primary backup--they can fail too
-stable and ample power can't be stressed enough (it led to the above two problems)
 
Originally posted by: SoundTheSurrender
Originally posted by: Looney
Yep, i'm a huge fan of RAID1 or RAID5. Once you go beyond 250gb, and especially 1TB+, it's just insane NOT to. Imagine losing 500GB or 1TB of pr0n?
Click to expand...

Fixed.
Click to expand...

:laugh:

Pr0n: driving up storage demands, engineering advanced dissemination methods (torrents, P2P) and cementing our need for more bandwidth (videos > pics). The reason we're not still stuck in the dialup age!
 
RAID is not a backup solution. This is why I monitor SMART data constantly and you use multiple drives.

I don't need RAID but I do backup. If my stuff crashes I won't complain, but I won't say I need RAID just for all that.
 
Originally posted by: ch33zw1z
You tell 'em Boz, lol. He would not have been able to run his OS until he replaced the drive, which is important for some. What you say is true, and he should take that into account for his most important documents. But for immediate problem avoidance in qualifying circumstances, RAID1 :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

You CAN run the system with just one drive from the array while the other is out being RMAed. It runs fine. Ive done it before numerous times.

And RAID1 IS a backup solution in my eyes....he proved it in the original post! He didnt lose anything. And neither have I. Try backing up several hundred gigs to optical disks or any other media besides a hard drive...lets see how much room THAT takes up.

 
RAID is a good protection against drive failures. If a drive dies, you have a backup. In larger RAID systems, you can lose more than one drive... but if you lose more than half, you lose it all. So, a power surge - or a spilled cup of coffee, or a dying power supply - can ruin your day.

Backups are good protection against losing data. If a virus, a trojan, or just a really dumb keystroke wipes something out, you can recover from this. Or if your drive dies, or all of your drives die (provided you don't backup to a running drive on the system). Really good backup systems can keep your data through true catastrophe's - like a fire.

Mirroring is a good way to do backing up in that you can create an actual image of the drive on another drive and it doesn't take all that long - typically less than an hour to do 400GB to another 400GB drive
.
Incremental backups - where you only backup what has changed - can take minutes if you haven't changed anything and you run it often.

Two-drive RAID1 one takes two drives and makes identical copies on both. You get a minor speed-up in access time since the system will use whatever drive has the head reach the data. But, as an example, it takes two 100GB drives and gives you 100GB of storage (with two copies of it).
Three-drive RAID5, takes 3 drives and stripes data across them with redundancy so that if one disk dies, you can still run the system, and you can get another drive and rebuild the system back. But, as an example, you'll take 3 100GB and will have 200GB of usable storage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

As others have said, RAID is not a replacement for backups. With our family videos and photos, my music collection, the recordings from the band that I'm in, all of my email, my financial records, my taxes for the last 6 years, and all of the letters that I've written and programs that I've authored... losing my data would be a calamity. I have a 3 drive, rotating mirroring system that I do monthly. I make incremental back-ups of photos to DVD and send them to my mom ("Merry Christmas, Mom. Here's all of the photos from last year for you" - without mentioning that she's my off-site backup system). I have a secondary fileserver in the house (a VIA MX10000 system running CentOS) which runs incremental backups of everything important nightly (and synch's the photos on my wife's and my computer). I don't use RAID - with the backup system that I have, I don't need to.
 
I'm not a huge fan of raid in desktop solutions or for gamers. I have yet to see test results that it helps in any game as opposed to one drive. Thats raid 0 of course. I also am not a fan of the lousy raid controllers placed on motherboards. To do raid right you have to buy a controller card and they are not cheap.

I am a huge fan of Acronis and an external 500GB USB drive 🙂

 
Originally posted by: jzodda
I'm not a huge fan of raid in desktop solutions or for gamers. I have yet to see test results that it helps in any game as opposed to one drive. Thats raid 0 of course. I also am not a fan of the lousy raid controllers placed on motherboards. To do raid right you have to buy a controller card and they are not cheap.

I am a huge fan of Acronis and an external 500GB USB drive 🙂
Click to expand...

Agreed. I have RAID 0 on my game drives, but it is more for knowing that they have the fastest hd setup available to them. I can tell the difference in benchmarks--I'm not sure if there is a difference in games though. Also keep in mind that I JUST have games on the RAID 0 array of 150gb Raptors. Storage info is on RAID 5 array on 400gb RE2 hds. Boot is on a single 150gb Raptor. Boot is backed up regularly and on schedule; storage is archived, and important stuff is saved other places. Games gets backed up maybe once a month, but save games are included in the scheduled backup.
 
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