external RAID drives

[northernpcgeek]

im building a new pc that will have RAID available, something that my current mobo does not have. currently i have most of my data on an external Buffalo RAID drive - i have older USB2 drives and one newer USB3 drive. but my current mobo only supports USB2 so dont get the USB3 speed. how easy is it to have internal hard drives set up RAID mode? my main boot drive will be an SSD. if an internal raid drive fails, how will i know? does windows message you? also how does the rebuilding proceed under Windows?

[peterb]

Why do you want RAID? It is really best on a server system to provide resilience and minimise downtime.

[northernpcgeek]

so there is a backup of my data should one of the drives fail. i still do keep a backup but its not always kept up to date. and if i had only one drive instead of a mirrored RAID setup i would have to spend more time doing regular backups. so there is a time saving benefit to having a raid setup.

[kalniel]

It is more reliable to use a scheduled back up rather than mirroring, but if you are making so many changes that you would need a very small backup increment then mirroring makes sense. The disadvantage of internal RAID (as I think you are asking about, not external?) is that if a drive failure is caused by a computer-wide event it'll affect the mirror as well - whether that's power surges, viruses, fire, water damage etc. You also have just as much wear on both disks, so if they're from the same manufacturing batch you can probably expect both to fail at about the same time if you use them equally, which you are doing by mirroring, while a backup disk should last much longer.

I don't run RAID myself, but I understand it is very easy to setup, especially if you are not mirroring your system drive. The intel user guide is here:
http://download.intel.com/support/ch...user_guide.pdf

If a drive fails you'll get a pop-up from the Intel RST icon in the corner and when you replace the failed drive you'll have the option to repair the array. During repair system performance will be degraded as there's a lot of file read/write going on.

[peterb]

RAID is not a backup solution, it is only protection against a single drive failure.

I do run RAID1 on a linux server, but I regularly back-up to an alternative media to mitigate against accidental file deletion, and total system failure.

Unless you are thinking about just connecting the external disk to fotm an array and then once the array has synchronised, remove it.... Which would work, but yiu'd be better iff just cloning a drive, or doing an incremental backup.

[northernpcgeek]

i have an external RAID drive on USB2 at the moment. but i'm building a new PC and inititially i was thinking about RAIDing 2 256GB SSD. route i may take now is just to have a single SSD boot drive and RAID 2 500GB hard drives which i have already. and keep data files that may get changed on the RAID drives and data that doesn't change much on the SSD drive.