Question Raid questions

[Fanatical Meat]

I’m planning on a new build soon, I have some important but not critical stuff stored on my PC for work.
I’m thinking about a raid set up with ssd drives to mirror each other so I don’t have to worry about losing data if one fails.
I have zero experience with raid set ups, if a motherboard supports Raid1 will that accomplish what I want to do? Will I need additional software?

 

[Billy Tallis]

Your money would be far better spent on getting a hard drive as your second drive, and using it for backups instead of RAID1. Mirroring SSDs almost guarantees that they'll fail at the same time if they're similar models.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

H

Your money would be far better spent on getting a hard drive as your second drive, and using it for backups instead of RAID1. Mirroring SSDs almost guarantees that they'll fail at the same time if they're similar models.

Didn’t think of that thank you. Would the mechanical HD need to be the same size?
I have a 1TB drive hanging around could that be used with let’s say a 500GB SSD?

 

[ch33zw1z]

I also use a single disk as "production", and pick up extra drives that are same size or larger and just use something like robocopy to mirror changes periodically. Currently, my first online backup targets are running under FreeNAS as just NTFS single disks, no RAID.

If you really want to do RAID (which is not a backup), I would recommend FreeNAS and running ZFS. If you have money to burn, check out Xi systems. They sell storage machines specifically with FreeNAS installed, and their solutions use ECC memory which is a nice bonus for that extra verification of bits. But, you would still want some offline(external) disks as backups.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

First and foremost, RAID1 is no substitute for backup. RAID1 is meant to protect you from drive failure when working on critical in flight data. It does NOT protect from data loss by itself.

For really critical and irreplaceable data, you'll want a 3 tier backup setup minimum. The more tiers the merrier.

Tier 0 is obviously your working set.
1st tier would be a secondary drive, either internal or external. I prefer external. With multiple copies, on multiple drives.
2rd tier would be some form of NAS. Again with redundancy.
For irreplaceable data 3rd tier is cold* offsite backup, or web-based backup services. Either way, long enough away that city/area wide events (think flooding etc.) doesn't affect data.

*old fashion optical discs or tape.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

So a standard backup drive is probably my best & simplest solution.
No data is mission critical type stuff just important stuff, the critical stuff is stored in dotloop an online service, which I’m confident is stored in a large corporation type way. Multiple copies, multiple locations.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

So a standard backup drive is probably my best & simplest solution.

Sounds like it. There is much to be said for keeping stuff as simple as possible. Added complexity also means more that can go wrong...

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Sounds like it. There is much to be said for keeping stuff as simple as possible. Added complexity also means more that can go wrong...

Now that I think about you are likely correct. I’m planning a new build and I’m all excited for a new project regarding my machine. If I backup a few times per month I’m likely covered good enough.

 

[mikeymikec]

Mirroring SSDs almost guarantees that they'll fail at the same time if they're similar models.

Not really. It seems to me that the only reason you think an SSD fails is because it's reached the max host writes.

Your money would be far better spent on getting a hard drive as your second drive, and using it for backups instead of RAID1.

Agree, unless maximum uptime was a priority.