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Question about a RAID setup
Bionic Monkey
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
I've purchased two 1TB drives in anticipation of setting up a RAID1 configuration in my computer. Then, down the line, I planned on doing so with another two 1TB drives.
But while doing research, I've found my information on RAID setups is wildly out of date, and I'm intrigued by the RAID5 setup, which as I understand it, would allow me to use the 4 drives, and obtain 3 TBs of storage, while keeping redundancy with a single drive.
Question 1: Is this correct, or have I badly missed something?
Question 2: I can't afford two more drives for a while yet. If I create the RAID1 now, and get two more drives later, will I be able to convert it into a RAID5 without having to format the previous drives?
But while doing research, I've found my information on RAID setups is wildly out of date, and I'm intrigued by the RAID5 setup, which as I understand it, would allow me to use the 4 drives, and obtain 3 TBs of storage, while keeping redundancy with a single drive.
Question 1: Is this correct, or have I badly missed something?
Question 2: I can't afford two more drives for a while yet. If I create the RAID1 now, and get two more drives later, will I be able to convert it into a RAID5 without having to format the previous drives?
Bionic Monkey on
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Answer 2: No. Any time you are changing a RAID array it'll require a format.
But consider this: With RAID1 you have to replace a dead/bad drive immediately because if you lose both drives you're hosed. With RAID5 you're still good on 3/4 drives until a 2nd one goes bad.
Oh and make sure you don't get Seagate 1TB drives. They are reportedly very bad quality. Their 500GB drives are awesome, though.
Also a rant on drives in general: My brother and I pulled a big network storage array from a datacenter that had 12 WD 500GB drives in it. It was used lightly for the 2 years it was in the rack. When we got it home 4 of the drives were dead which meant 100% data loss (it was RAID 5+1). How do 33% of the drives go bad that fast? FFS!
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No a $1500 rackmount drive array in a datacenter is not poorly cooled. The drives were probably from the same batch, though. All were bought from Newegg I think.
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Two drives from the same batch failing has already bitten me in the ass. I bought two 500 GB drives about two years ago, and they both died on me within a year of each other, which is why I'm moving onto a RAID setup. I'm sick of doing drive recovery on HDDs this big.
As for the particular drives I purchased, I bought two WD caviar green drives off Newegg. I bought them at the same time, so they'll probably be from the same batch. I'll make sure to buy the next two non-consecutively though.
If you lose a disk in a RAID 1 set you have exactly as much fault tolerance to drive failure as you do when you lose a disk in a RAID 5 set, which is none.
see, I dont' bother with RAID because I back up. Because no matter how good your raid setup is, if you don't have a good backup solution you're still vulnerable. Sure, you can have an 8 drive Raid 5 setup and have lots of fault tolerance, but if the raid controller dies, the data is just as gone.
Proper backups > RAID.
That's just silly. They are two completely different types of data protection, and any 'real' solution is going to involve both.
You buy tapes for data integrity. You buy raid for hardware integrity. Tapes won't do you jack shit if you don't have any hard drives available, and raid won't do you jack shit if you don't have any data to fill them with.
Excluding one in favor of the other is the mark of an amateur.
Well yes. At work our main Storage server is a 9 drive Raid 5 with a daily tape backup.
But I'm taking about home use. I've run raid at home in the past, and find that generally, it's more trouble than it's worth.
I run windows home server at home for local backup, but I also use carbonite online backup for the most important shit that I can't lose, which are important documents and pictures mostly.
I always recommend people do at least some form of off site backup. Even keeping an external HDD with your important stuff in your car, or at home, or where ever, keep something off site. having a backup to an external HDD that sits on top of your computer is no good if your house burns down. A friend of a friend lost 5,000 pictures in a house fire. They had 3 copies of each picture, but none of them were recoverable from the burned down house. Sure that's the extreme case, but I cannot imagine losing the digital pictures I've taken over the years. Music, video, windows, everything else can be replaced, so local backup is fine. But financial stuff and pictures goes off site.
Get a $25 DVD burner and make that your backup solution. The space limitations may require some shuffling to get it right, but DVD's burn about as fast as tape writes, and you can access the data a whole lot more easily.
I think raid is useful at home, from the 'oops I lost a hard drive' angle.
If you're doing backups at home, like you should be doing regardless of any RAID, then it's not really that big of a deal. I've had disks die, I just reinstall Windows and restore my crucial data and carry on, no one is waiting on it or anything and backup storage can be cheap.
RAID for performance is perfectly suitable for the home desktop though, particularly if you're a gamer. I have a RAID0 for my Windows desktop and a NAS for backing up my documents and media.