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What RAID option is best for me?

Z

zolo

Member
Here's what I have: Gigabyte P35-DS3R latest bios (F12) & chipset, windows vista ultimate X86 with latest updates. 3X 500GB WD SATA HDD's installed and been running in my HTPC for almost a year. The first HDD has 3 partitions, C:/ for OS, D for linux & E for storage, 2nd HDD has one partition and so does the third HDD both almost full of crap, I just bought 3 other 500GB WD SATA HDD's that I wana use to back up the ones I have. I've been doing manual backups because of fear that I might lose anything when setting RAID. But after filling those HDD's with crap, and getting new ones, it's kinda annoying having to do this for 1.5TB worth of stuff, so I'm gonna try to understand RAID, and how it works before I touch anything. But let me ask this, which RAID option is best for me? If you were in my case, what would you do?

 
What do you want the RAID for? Even with RAID you need backups.

The point of RAID is not so that you never have to back things up, it's so that your system can keep chugging if one drive fails.
 
I want RAID so everything I have is coppied to 2 different HDD's, if either one died on me I wouldn't care that much cause I'd still have a copy in the other HDD.

I have 3 almost full HDD's in my tower right now, I wana add 3 new ones. But, I don't want to copy the stuff from the old HDD's into the newer ones manually everytime, ya know?
 
1. Partitions just crap things up, IMO.
You don't gain performance, you lose it. Yes partitions look like nice little cubby holes for all your stuff.
But only one set of read/write heads are doing all the work.

2. If you want speed and some type of redundancy, go with 3 or 4 of your drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

3. If the MB or RAID controller goes out, so does your array. But you can backup to a RAID 1 NAS for more redundancy.

4. You can use backup software to copy over your backups.
 
Originally posted by: zolo
I want RAID so everything I have is coppied to 2 different HDD's, if either one died on me I wouldn't care that much cause I'd still have a copy in the other HDD.
Click to expand...

But if you accidentally delete a file\corrupt a file\virus eats a file all your "backups" are instantaneously deleted\corrupted\eaten. RAID != backup.

With your current setup if you don't want to restore your data really the only thing you can do is create 3 raid 1 sets (1 for each current drive). With that you gain no performance advantage (possibly a small penalty) and you could in theory survive multiple drive failures as long as no 2 are in the same set.

With RAID 5 you would get all your data off all the drives then make a 6 drive array and reapply your data. You should get a small performance boost and can survive a single drive failure (but you are now 6x more likely to have a failure).

Another option is to create 2 3 disk raid 5 arrays each striping with parity and one full array backup but thats a bit more complex and odds are the integrated RAID solution does not support it.
 
Speed/performance is not what I'm after here. I just want the files that I download to drive D for example, at the same time it coppies itself to drive F so I have a backup of that file in 2 different HDD's in case 1 fails on me.

So, RAID is not the right option for me then?


4. You can use backup software to copy over your backups.
Click to expand...

I've thought abut this before, but I thought RAID was a better solution.
 
What do you do if both fail? Let's say you have a nasty lightning strike that just flat out fries the PC?
 
Originally posted by: DSF
What do you do if both fail? Let's say you have a nasty lightning strike that just flat out fries the PC?
Click to expand...

So what would you recommend then?

In these HDDs I add/remove files to/from all the time. I wana rest assured that at least I backed them up into another hdd. But still gonna be in the same tower though :/




Thanks for the recomendations Blain, I'll check them out 🙂
 
Sounds you would like what I have. I have a RAID 1 (mirror) array for all my data files. That is in turn backed up to a single external drive.

The odds of both RAID 1 drives failing are not great, but it could happen. In that case you can easily rebuild the array.

I just went through that process not because of a RAID drive failure, but because I upgraded the array to larger drives. That was easy using the backup drive.

To make things even more redundant - I have two computers, and the #2 system has the same data files on its own RAID array. The external backup services both machines.
 
I was actually thinking about doing that myself, but didn't know where to start; thanks for the info corkyg. I have a P4 system collecting dust I might put to work. It won't be good for my elecrical bill, but I might just turn it off after it's done copying new files that were added that day/week. Or just replace the space heater with and Atom proc/mobo combo, and add a wireless card and use it to extend my wireless coverage since it's kinda low downstairs, I think it's doable? But was wondering, is there such a program that will do the backup duty over ethernet connection after I mirror these 3 hard drives to the new one ones that I'll install downstairs in the other tower, weekly? I'll go read the acronics true image home software docs.

Thank you guys for the info 🙂
 
corkyg's setup is very well rounded; you should try and think of it as that RAID is not backup, it's to reduce downtime incase of a single drive failure.
 
I'd probably buy a decent NAS enclosure that does a RAID 5 of the drives and put
4x1TB drives in for 3TB usable or 4x500GB for 1.5TB usable storage, or of course add a
fifth drive if your NAS enclosure takes 5 drives.

I'd buy one more drive on sale of the same size and keep it in a safe place to replace the first one that fails in the RAID set (it is necessary to do that).

After a year or so if I hadn't done it already I'd upgrade to 1TB drives.

I'd probably also keep a 1TB or 500GB drive in the HTPC NOT using RAID just for "local" temporary storage for recent recordings etc.

Unfortunately I don't know how to get Media Center to store things as "Recorder Storage" in TWO different places, maybe someone else does. But anyway it can access already stored media in multiple different places, so you can just move recordings you plan to keep long term to the shared folder on the NAS.

 
Your best bet is have two drives then rsync the data every night to the other drive. Like others have said raid != backup.

Also based on some reading I've done software raid (what I read refered mostly to Linux) is actually better for redundancy, as it is not depending on a controller. I put this to the test by doing retarded things to my test raid5 array such as unplugging a live drive while it is rebuilding, and never managed to break it. Though I'm sure it CAN still fail.

For proper backups though I'd have a removable drive tray and just remove the drive after a backup and rotate between a few drives. You want at least one backup to be offline. Say a huge virus, or power surge or other thing crashes your PC real bad taking all the data with it, raid or even 2 live disks wont save you.
 
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