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Newbie questions about RAID

B

blackrain

Golden Member
I have an Asus P5N-E SLI board. My understanding is that it supports 4 channels Serial ATA with RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5. I recently acquired 2x 120GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 drives. I have never tried out RAID before, so I was thinking of trying it out. I am primarily interested in RAID for backup of the O/S drive so I don't have to reload everything if one of the drives die. I plan on having a 3rd drive for bulk storage of data (I assume that won't be a problem). Thus, this is primarily for an O/S. So got a few questions.

1) Is it RAID 0 that I want? Is that a fullproof backup solution? If not, is there another RAID arrangement that I should try?

2) Can someone point me to a good tutorial for setting up a RAID...something like RAID for dummies with a simple walk through. Otherwise, I am going to have to come back and ask lots of dumb questions.

3) Finally, if this isn't ideal for backup, maybe I should try RAID 1. Is the speed improvement really noticeable?
 
RAID 1 is data mirroring, so that's what you want if you're going for redundancy. There is typically a performance hit for this mode; not exactly something you want for an OS drive. You'd usually use that mode for something to want to protect from drive failure.

Note that redundancy is different from a "backup". Redundancy does not protect you from file corruption or accidental deletion or a wide variety of other occurances where you'd want a backup.

RAID 0 is data striping. You will see a performance gain with this mode, but personally I've found that onboard RAID controllers are more trouble than they're worth, especially with high performance large disks like the WD Black and extremely fast SSD options.
 
Veri745 did a good job describing some basic RAID systems.

The "most bulletproof" backup system is to make backups onto a separate hard disk. System image backups are the best if you want fast recovery of entire system. The restoration process will bring back the entire OS in one step, exactly like it was when the backup was made.

All recent versions of Windows have some sort of backup capability. Some can do image backups. Acronis and StorageCraft make good imaging backup software for desktops. Acronis can be purchased on sale sometimes.

The best thing you could do with a single backup disk would be to put it in an external housing (or one of the new SATA disk docking stations, probably using USB) and make periodic image backups, disconnecting the backup drive when not doing backups.

If you find you aren't doing backups like you should, you COULD leave the backup disk always attached. It's certainly MUCH better than no backups, but leaving it attached brings a small chance of a virus damaging your backups as well as your main disk.

Also, be sure to check once in a while that your backups are actually working as planned, that you are backing up everything you need to back up, and that you can actually read the data on the backups.
 
Here is 4 WD 1TB Black in raid 0
Raid.jpg
 
Sounds like I had RAID 0 and 1 mixed up (I was going by wikipedia). It doesn't sound like it makes sense to use RAID for backup. Since I have the RAID functionality (and 2 exactly similar 120GB drives), I would hate for the functionality to go to waste or not be used. I don't plan on running out to get a new WD black drive or SSD anytime soon, so it sounds like I should use RAID 0 to get some use out of my onboard RAID for a performance increase. Is that the right arrangement for the most performance increase?

veri745 said:
RAID 1 is data mirroring, so that's what you want if you're going for redundancy. There is typically a performance hit for this mode; not exactly something you want for an OS drive. You'd usually use that mode for something to want to protect from drive failure.

Note that redundancy is different from a "backup". Redundancy does not protect you from file corruption or accidental deletion or a wide variety of other occurances where you'd want a backup.

RAID 0 is data striping. You will see a performance gain with this mode, but personally I've found that onboard RAID controllers are more trouble than they're worth, especially with high performance large disks like the WD Black and extremely fast SSD options.
Click to expand...
 
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RAID 0 is the way to go if you want to maximize performace out of those drives, but I wouldn't advise neglecting a backup solution if any of your data is important to you.
 
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