RAID Help

[awb23]

One of my hard drives died and its going to cost me alot more then just the cost of a new hard drive. I had a ton of important information that is irreplacable. I don't want this happening again so I'm going to try RAID out, although I've never used it. My mobo supports raid 0, raid 1, and raid 0+1. That's what the manual says at least, I have no idea what any of that means. The only thing I know about raid is that it requires at least 2 hard drives. Also, I'm going to have to install windows again, how do I set up windows while in raid configuration? Or is the same ? Anyways if anyone can help me get set up with this raid thing I'd be very grateful. After I figure this all out I'm going to run to circuit city today sometime and buy my hard drives. Thanks for any help in advance!

 

[John]

This should get you started

 

[jleves]

RAID is really designed to maximize uptime more than protecting the data. If you have critical data, you might be better off getting one harddrive to replace the one that went bad and a USB harddrive to copy the important information to every day. Just a thought.

 

[awb23]

Whats the best way to protect my data then? I'm not a fan of just copying my information over every single day to a separate drive. Plus that doesn't save me from have to reinstalling windows all over again (having to reinstall everything, losing all my remembered passwords etc) if my windows partitioned drive goes out.

I'm not really looking to increase performance, all my stuff runs just fine. I can have 30 firefox's open without any slowdown, so I'm not complaining.

I just want to have EVERYTHING backed up on my computer, so if something goes out, I don't have to waste time finding the faulty drive, reinstalling windows, all the programs, passwords, etc etc. All that takes time I just don't have. If/When it goes out, all I have to do is run to circuit city on my own time and grab another hard drive when its convenient, but windows and all my data will still be intact until I get that other hard drive. I just have the convenient and ease of use mentality here. I hope raid can do this for me. I just don't know what I'm doing yet =/

 

[awb23]

Okay I just read that wikipedia site and now I think I'm even more confused =/

It looks like I need to impliment raid 1, to accomplish what I want. *shrug*

 

[John]

You don't need raid; you need to perform periodic data backups.

 

[awb23]

I don't understand what the difference is then. Raid is at least a LIVE backup at all times, if one hard drive dies you will have a backup at that very instant that the hard drive died. Say I didn't have raid and just did periodic backups...What if I just finished writing an important document and my computer crashed and died because of hard drive failure...I'd lose that document right?

Is there any reason not to get a mirror raid setup...and then have and external backup hard drive for periodic updates? Then i'd have the best of both worlds. Expensive? Yes..but a couple extra hard drives is nothing compared to how much money I've lost because of a faulty hard drive and lost data.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Originally posted by: jleves
RAID is really designed to maximize uptime more than protecting the data. If you have critical data, you might be better off getting one harddrive to replace the one that went bad and a USB harddrive to copy the important information to every day. Just a thought.

wrong. RAID is designed for speed and redundacy...RAID 1 is the way to go for simple data backup. If one drive dies, you install another and the RAID controller rebuilds it for you and you have an exact copy again. The more money you throw at RAID, the better it gets...

I would recommend backing up any important files to DVDs or CDs incase you encouter major systems problems.

awb, do exactly what you said in the previous post, RAID 1...and an extra backup to be safe. USB HD, DVD, or CDs...it's up to you how you want to do it.

also, you will want to consider running windows on a seperate drive and putting the data on the mirrored setup...