RAID 1 control?

[Rike]

I?m setting up a RAID 1 with two 74 G Raptors (already purchased) on an Asus A8V that has software RAID by Promise and VIA.

Which of these controllers will be more dependable? Or should I get a hardware solution?

The goal is maximum data security with two fast drives.

Please advise.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Rike
The goal is maximum data security with two fast drives.

Please advise.

Forget RAID 1 if you want "maximum" data security! Use a single drive, then set the second drive up as an external drive.
Ghost/Image the 1st drive onto the 2nd drive each day. Then move the second drive to a different location.

 

[c1001]

I have my A8V setup in RAID 1 thru the VIA connectors with 2x Seagate Barracuda 200 gig HDD. The VIA controller was recommended to me by a Monarch Computer tech support person because more mobo resources are consumed by the Promise controller.

It took me several attempts to get controller working (the BIOS didn't "see" the second HDD). But once it took, it works fine.

 

[Rike]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Rike
The goal is maximum data security with two fast drives.

Please advise.

Forget RAID 1 if you want "maximum" data security! Use a single drive, then set the second drive up as an external drive.
Ghost/Image the 1st drive onto the 2nd drive each day. Then move the second drive to a different location.

It's funny that you mention that, because I already have a Maxtor (sp?) one touch drive for external back up. That's a weekly back-up. I'm looking for on the fly back-up on a workstation. If I save just half a days work, the other Raptor is paid for.

Is there any issue with software RAID? Or should I just go with what's on the mobo?

 

[Rike]

Originally posted by: c1001
I have my A8V setup in RAID 1 thru the VIA connectors with 2x Seagate Barracuda 200 gig HDD. The VIA controller was recommended to me by a Monarch Computer tech support person because more mobo resources are consumed by the Promise controller.

It took me several attempts to get controller working (the BIOS didn't "see" the second HDD). But once it took, it works fine.

Good piece of info. What gave you trouble in the setup?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Rike
The goal is maximum data security with two fast drives.

Please advise.

Forget RAID 1 if you want "maximum" data security! Use a single drive, then set the second drive up as an external drive.
Ghost/Image the 1st drive onto the 2nd drive each day. Then move the second drive to a different location.

This doesn't help you if your hard drive blows up just before (or while!) you're backing it up, possibly ruining the backup without you knowing. You'd need at least two 'backup' drives that you rotate, so that if you don't get a clean backup, or the 'backup' drive breaks when you go to use it, you're not SOL.

RAID1 doesn't replace a backup solution -- but regular backups aren't a superset of RAID1 functionality, either.

 

[Rike]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
This doesn't help you if your hard drive blows up just before (or while!) you're backing it up, possibly ruining the backup without you knowing. You'd need at least two 'backup' drives that you rotate, so that if you don't get a clean backup, or the 'backup' drive breaks when you go to use it, you're not SOL.

Makes sense. I could always pick up another external and rotate them.

RAID1 doesn't replace a backup solution -- but regular backups aren't a superset of RAID1 functionality, either.

I understand the first part of this, but my ignorance about the second part is making me unhappy. :| One more time in different words for the especially dense?

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Rike
The goal is maximum data security with two fast drives.

Please advise.

Forget RAID 1 if you want "maximum" data security! Use a single drive, then set the second drive up as an external drive.
Ghost/Image the 1st drive onto the 2nd drive each day. Then move the second drive to a different location.

This doesn't help you if your hard drive blows up just before (or while!) you're backing it up, possibly ruining the backup without you knowing. You'd need at least two 'backup' drives that you rotate, so that if you don't get a clean backup, or the 'backup' drive breaks when you go to use it, you're not SOL.

RAID1 doesn't replace a backup solution -- but regular backups aren't a superset of RAID1 functionality, either.

You are correct...
He needs a RAID 1 array, An online storage plan, external HD back-up, DVD-RW back-up and finally, stacks and stacks of floppy disks.

 

[Rike]

You know, I thought about floppies. Cheap, reliable. And then I realized I'd have a different kind of storage problem. Where do you put 51 million floppies?

Anyone what to weight in on hardware vs. software RAID?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Rike

RAID1 doesn't replace a backup solution -- but regular backups aren't a superset of RAID1 functionality, either.

I understand the first part of this, but my ignorance about the second part is making me unhappy. :| One more time in different words for the especially dense?

A backup lets you recover your data (at least since the time of the backup) in the event that something (anything 'bad') happens to your system and makes the original data unusable.

RAID1 allows your system to remain online, and with your data intact, if you suffer a physical failure of one (actually, all but one, if you have more than 2 drives in the RAID1 array) of the drives that are part of the RAID1.

RAID1 is limited in that it does not protect you against software or high-level hardware malfunctions (getting a virus, or a bug in a program or disk controller failure wiping out your data), or user error (you format the wrong partition), or multiple disk failures (the other disk breaks before you can rebuild the array), or catastrophic loss (the building the computer is in burns to the ground).

Backups can protect you against all those things -- but they don't provide real-time mirroring like a RAID1 array does. Even if you do a daily backup, you could still lose an entire day's worth of data if the drive blows up just before (or during) a backup operation. For some systems, that's not acceptable, and doing full backups every five minutes is not feasable (and sometimes, as with financial data, even that wouldn't be enough). SAN/NAS systems that provide journalling/snapshotting can let you do point-in-time and/or incremental backups online, but there will still always be a 'window' of new data that hasn't been backed up yet unless you're mirroring it in real time. Furthermore, hard disks fail randomly, and there's really nothing you can do about it. So if you need a system to stay up *all* the time, you *have* to use some sort of redundant mirrored RAID (RAID1, 0+1, or 5 being the most common), so that it doesn't crash and burn if a single hard disk fails. Backups don't provide that functionality.

 

[c1001]

With the A8V you enter the RAID utility during the POST to setup the RAID configuration. When I would go thru the process of telling it to setup RAID 1 it would then search for the second drive for a while and then exit out to Windows. Windows then copied every file over to second drive, but after rebooting I noticed that RAID was not setup. Had the same problem with the Promise controller as well. I lost most of a day with rebooting, retrying, testing for a bad HDD, etc. I finally solved the problem by going to bed and trying it again the next morning. Worked like a charm!

 

[Rike]

Originally posted by: c1001
I finally solved the problem by going to bed and trying it again the next morning. Worked like a charm!

LOL! Sleep is the answer to so many of life's problems.

 

[Rike]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Rike

RAID1 doesn't replace a backup solution -- but regular backups aren't a superset of RAID1 functionality, either.

I understand the first part of this, but my ignorance about the second part is making me unhappy. :| One more time in different words for the especially dense?

A backup lets you recover your data (at least since the time of the backup) in the event that something (anything 'bad') happens to your system and makes the original data unusable.

RAID1 allows your system to remain online, and with your data intact, if you suffer a physical failure of one (actually, all but one, if you have more than 2 drives in the RAID1 array) of the drives that are part of the RAID1.

RAID1 is limited in that it does not protect you against software or high-level hardware malfunctions (getting a virus, or a bug in a program or disk controller failure wiping out your data), or user error (you format the wrong partition), or multiple disk failures (the other disk breaks before you can rebuild the array), or catastrophic loss (the building the computer is in burns to the ground).

Backups can protect you against all those things -- but they don't provide real-time mirroring like a RAID1 array does. Even if you do a daily backup, you could still lose an entire day's worth of data if the drive blows up just before (or during) a backup operation. For some systems, that's not acceptable, and doing full backups every five minutes is not feasable (and sometimes, as with financial data, even that wouldn't be enough). SAN/NAS systems that provide journalling/snapshotting can let you do point-in-time and/or incremental backups online, but there will still always be a 'window' of new data that hasn't been backed up yet unless you're mirroring it in real time. Furthermore, hard disks fail randomly, and there's really nothing you can do about it. So if you need a system to stay up *all* the time, you *have* to use some sort of redundant mirrored RAID (RAID1, 0+1, or 5 being the most common), so that it doesn't crash and burn if a single hard disk fails. Backups don't provide that functionality.

Thanks, Matthias99. I see the light now.