To Raid 1 or not - office PC storage building help

[beastyben1]

Hi everyone. Built a decent office PC for my wife. Backups are extremely important.

Storage items:
(2) 250GB WD Scorpio Blacks (2010 and 2012 manu date)
(1) 1TB WD Scorpio Blue (2012 manu date)
(1) 128GB Samsung 830 (currently in my home pc but I can give it up)

Win7 Pro machine, 8GB, Intel G540 in a nice Lian Li. ECS H61 mobo.

I tried Win7 Raid 1 with the 250GBs with the OS on one of them and it's had to resynch a few times likely b/c of Windows updates. Not too happy about the resynching and how long it takes.

Any combination with this hardware that would provide redundancy or excellent backup? I have Norton Ghost 15 as well to use. I'll have offsite online backup too. Thank you.

 

[Cerb]

How important is minimizing unplanned downtime? That is the thing RAID is best for.

If backups are important, figure out backups. RAID can help in addition to backups, but it does not provide anywhere near the level of data redundancy that a backup does. It protects against the disk catastrophically failing, and against the disk failing in a way that it, the drive controller, or the RAID driver, can become aware of and handle, so that your system can be operational during and after the failure. It does not protect your data. Silent corruption can still occur. Bitrot can still occur. Accidental deletion can still occur. Et cetera. Also, if something that is not a brand new write gets corrupted, RAID 1 might not even be able to figure out which drive's version of the data is correct, on NTFS.

RAID is for system availability.
Backups are for data redundancy.

Ghost will do versioned backups, right? If so, do that, first and foremost. I haven't used it a long time, but it's probably the path of least resistance. Make sure it has a means to verify CRCs of the backups, too (a 'test' button, most likely).

BTW, I suspect the sync problems have to do with severely mismatched drives.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Boot from SSD. Storage (including user data directories) on 250GB RAID-1. (Mirrored) Once you get all your applications installed and such on the SSD, copy an image to the 1TB drive in case you need to restore.

Shadow copy to 1TB drive for versioned backups + Carbonite for offsite. ($60 a year.)

Congratulations, you're still not as well protected as a data center. But the likelihood of you actually losing data is very, very slim. (Basically, all three of your HDDs would have to fail at the same time Carbonite's data center caught fire.)

 

[Emulex]

Windows 2012 - use file based raid. aka spaces.

These drives are not TLER so they will ultimately fail you in raid-1.

I'd just run them jbod and make backups. Raid-1 is going to decrease reliability with non-tler drives. Guaranteed.