limey said:
I am currently getting ready to build a file server for my home network using Windows XP. I have a Gigabyte K8 Triton with a AMD Athlon 64 3000+ cpu. I am planning using Raid 1 with two 500Gb hard drives. My motherboard uses nvRaid so I will not have to have a controller card.
My question is, Has anyone else used raid on a smaller scale and what were the results and or opinions. Any opinions on using either software raid or hardware raid would be good too.
Firstly this is in the wrong section i moved it to HDD section.
Also raid 1 is a good setup for a file sever in that you have some good redundency if one drive fails, you will of course only get 500gb of storage capacity.
Raid 0 is the one that people tout as giving performance gains, but for the most part they are overrated. Depending on the level of use of this file severs you may see some advantage of Raid 0. This will give you the full 1000gb, but no redundency.
Personally i feel the lack of a redundency/failsafe is unacceptable in a file sever.
Be aware of the difference between Raid 1 (the mirror raid) and a back up. Raid 1 is only good for recovering if one drive dies. It is not a back up of your data as it does not exist independent of the other drive, for example if you accidentally delete a file on your hard drive is will instantly be deleted on the mirrored drive in the array, unlike is a backup.
For a good backup solution consider a tape deck with over night storage, or many of the online storage sites, or just set the two drive up seperatly and use 1 hdd as a backup (not the bext backup solution in the event of a wide system failure)
not really 1000gb != 1tb.
(plus you have to take away space for the file system)
Dont worry about it- RAID is awesome.
which raid?
