I'm shopping for a new Dell desktop. Trying to decide what's the best hard drive back-up system. Options appear to be: (a) a 160G RAID 1 (2 x 160 GB SATA HDDs) or (b) 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) with 160GB USB External Hard Drive (7200rpm). Prices are similar. I'm a heavy word-processor (sometimes book-length projects), a moderate spreadsheet user, and expect to get more into digital photography and some photo editing. I've been a PC user for a long time (owned a Kaypro II), but don't really know much about the technical stuff. I've read that RAID has certain complexities. The external option promises "one-button back-up." A significant part of the motivation to upgrade is that my current hard drive threatens to give up the ghost. Any recommendations on which of these options is better? Or some other? Any reason to prefer "RAID 0" over "RAID 1" for my kind of use? MANY THANKS for any and all enlightenment.
RAID v. External Hard Drive
- Thread starter jerry
- Start date
Without reading the rest of your post the answer is RAID.
The external option promises "one-button back-up." A significant part of the motivation to upgrade is that my current hard drive threatens to give up the ghost
The external one is much more convenient yes but isnt really a backup. Consider this:
- You have 1HDD worth of data that you want to back up
- You can either use the one-button deal and assume for a second the backup procedure is successful.
- Or you can use the RAID technique and assume also that everything works out
- Now suppose you have a drive failure of the original drive
- If you use RAID, you wont notice the drive failure (other than the HDD light being on). With the one-button approach you'll defnitely notice (because u'll be resotring).
- Another point for RAID is that, its essentially a real-time thingy i.e., your data is backed up as you go and you dont have to stop your work and press some button.
- Lastly, RAID works at whatever speed your drives work at -- rather than USB2 speed (which is slower).
RAID0 = not something you're interested in, you get a theoretical 100% read improvement, 0% write improvement although in reality its closer to 30% mostly because of overhead
RAID1 = this is actually RAID
, you take two drives and you make a on-the-fly clone of one drive to the other; if one of your drives suffers a catastrophic failure, you simply carry on whatever you were doing and the other drive restores the first. RAID5 = now if you're really really working on important stuff then this is prolly the best route to go (well the best affordable route) ... you get read and write performance boosts as well as scalable redundancy (something RAID1 doesnt offer ... then again most peopple dont really need this kinda redundancy)