Thinking of RAID?

Shane

Shane

Super Moderator
Staff member
Hey guys,

Im thinking of setting up raid on my system....i think its RAID 1 i need?
The one that mirrors data across two hard drives?

what i intend to do is...keep my 250gb hard drive as the primary drive for my os/games....then buy a second 500Gb hard drive to raid with my current 500gb i have as storage so if one fails my data will be saved.

What do i need to achive this?


  • does i need to buy another 500gb hard drive and one with the same cache? does it have to be the same make hard drive?

  • Do i have to buy a raid controller card? if so are they all good?
This is what iwas looking at....
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/123967/show_product_reviews

  • Is it easy to set up?

tks
 
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yeah you do need to have the 2 HDD's with the same cache. they have to have be the same size, speed and cache but it doesn't matter if say one is a seagate and the other a WD.
you do need a RAID controller card, you mobo doesn't have on build in. iv only ever use the RAID controlller on my mobo so i dont know if PCI on's are any good, cant see why they wouldn't be.
that card you picked looks fine, shouldnt give you any probs
yup RAID is really easy to set up
 
I had a bad experience with RAID a while back. I thought everything was set up good and was working fine. I was wrong:( I tried the same thing you want...2 drives with mirrored info. One crashed and I thought...oh well...I'll just have the one drive with everything on it. When "My computer" was open I could see both drives...open them both and they looked the same. You could open a file from either drive with no issues. When one crashed...the other drive showed empty:eek: I am not sure what I did wrong or why that happened. Worked on those drives for weeks trying to get stuff back...no success.

Lost tons of stuff I'll never get back...pictures, videos and music. Lost a few program files from software I bought also. About 1.5 years of stuff from the kids I don't have now.

My new setup takes a little more time but I will never loose an important file again. I have 2 hard drives for storage. Whenever I get pictures or video from my camera...or anything really that I want to keep...I just manually copy it onto both drives. That way I am certain it will be one the other if one fails.

RAID works great and many people swear by it...I just had bad luck I guess:o
 
RAID 1 slows performance as it requires both drives to be in read/write synchronicity. Really, RAID 1 is, in my humble opinion, mostly for a product machine or a server technology. I don't really think it is meant for the end user to really use.

In fact, I think RAID is that all across the board. I would never recommend RAID to a client unless it was a production machine or server. By production machine I mean a computer that needs to be in constant use. For example, I did some work for a photography studio a few years back. My buddy designed their website so he pawned off any actual tech work to me. There were two computers that had to be running all day every day that they used for digital photography. I set up RAID 1 in those because if those machines go down the guy is losing money.

Really, if you are looking for a back up solution I would suggest looking another route, plus if both drives fail or you get massive corruption on one drive, it mirrors it to the second drive.
 
Personally, im a fan of raid 5. It gives you the capacity of all drives in the array, minus one drive. It gives the increased performance of raid 0, while also maintaining parity like raid 1. In essence, you can have three 500gb drives(for a total of 1TB of storage), if one drive fails you can put in a new drive and rebuild the array without losing data.
 
hmm thanks for your replies.....im total stumped on what i should do! :cool:

I just want some sort of reliable backup.....ive not realy had good luck with hard drives :o
 
RAID 1 is not a back up, it is a synchronized mirror, if you contract a virus the virus gets mirrored to the other drive. It is meant as technology for no down time in a production machine.

I would just get an external hard drive or set up a NAS and back up important data to that, and then if a system fails, reload the OS and copy data back over.

RAID 5 is kind of pricey for the RAID 5 card and well, overkill for what you want.
 
I agree, an external hard drive is great. Back up to the external and you can have it off when not in use. Therefore no viruses can get in. Also if you want to take your info with you, they are portable. And lastly, if someone steals your computer like they did mine, your backup drive is in the pc and now is also gone.
 
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