RAID and non Raid all together?

[BWVictorious]

Heyas
My SSD (OCZ Vertex 2 of two years) just died on me. BIOS doesnt recognise it nor does it work on my laptop via an external bay.

So I now I have to replace drives and am starting to wonder about my personal data.

Is is possible to have 4 harddrives (plus dvd) on a computer with only 2 of them linked in a RAID?
I never used raid but i was thinking of

1 SSD for boot/games
1 HDD for storage
2 HDD in Raid1 for safe storage of my personal stuff.

Is this possible?
Is there a better way to safekeep personal stuff (40gigs+ unfortunately... mostly photos and home videos so no compression)

Yours Truly
K

[b0redom]

Sure you can do that, but RAID is not backup. I have all my pics etc on a single physical disk, which is then backed up to a RAID array using a non-destructive rsync. I also semi-regularly do a backup to a standalone disk and am considering monthly BluRay archival too and setting up a 2nd RAID array with the folks incase the house gets robbed etc.

Sounds like a lot, but I have probably 50 GB of irreplacable data - wedding photos, pics and vids of the kids school concerts etc. Depends on how valuable your data is.

[BWVictorious]

but RAID is not backup.

are you sure?
I never used RAID arrays in my life as I never really bothered that much with it but I could swear that RAID1 was a live backup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standar..._levels#RAID_1

It would mean that all the files (in the raid array) would be in both disks at the same time so if it happens that one disk suddenly dies the other one has a full valid up to date copy.

Of course there is always the chance that both die simultaneously.... but then Im really screwed.

Yours Truly
K

[smargh]

The Internet hereby sentences you to 500 lines on a blackboard: RAID is not a backup.

RAID is for high availability on Enterprise class hardware, i.e. hot-swap, less chance of interruptions during working hours. It's not a backup. Doing RAID on consumer level hardware could potentially be more problematic than straightforward scheduled regular drive cloning/imaging. Some people will feel very happy with RAID1, but it has significant pitfalls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

"A RAID system used as secondary storage is not an alternative to backing up data. In RAID levels > 0, a RAID protects from catastrophic data loss caused by physical damage or errors on a single drive within the array (or two drives in, say, RAID 6). However, a true backup system has other important features such as the ability to restore an earlier version of data, which is needed both to protect against software errors that write unwanted data to secondary storage, and also to recover from user error and malicious data deletion. A RAID can be overwhelmed by catastrophic failure that exceeds its recovery capacity and, of course, the entire array is at risk of physical damage by fire, natural disaster, and human forces, while backups can be stored off-site. A RAID is also vulnerable to controller failure because it is not always possible to migrate a RAID to a new, different controller without data loss."

I, personally, do use RAID1, but only because I don't wan't to have to turn off my PC to swap out a dead drive. I would never use RAID on a consumer level controller or enclosure - I use a very an oldie but goodie Adaptec 3405 (with battery-backed write cache) together with a hot-swap enclosure. I do try to regularly do off-site backups, but I often forget, which will one day bite me in the ass.

If I didn't have the card & enclosure, I would do regular cloning. "Soft" RAID, requiring OS drivers, is a terrible idea. However, some implementations of the Windows Home Server "drive pooling" style does seem promising.

[BWVictorious]

document.open();
for(var i=0,c=500;i<c;i++)
{
document.writeln("<h1>RAID is not a backup</h1>");
}
document.close();

Sorry!
Ok, I didnt mean a real backup as in safe for all eternity.
But it would ensure that in the event of (a single) drive failure my data would be still safe. Wouldnt even need to hot swap the drive.

The reason im asking is when a drive goes (had two go dead on me now) all its data is gone. RAID1 seems to be able to counter this effect without having the need to clone/backup the data. It just dumps it to two different hdds.

But Ive decided not to bother with RAID1 just because of the cost/effort needed.
Ill just make a copy of the data onto another hdd and update it every now and again.

Thanks for all your help

Yours Truly
K

[FatalSaviour]

document.open();
for(var i=0,c=500;i<c;i++)
{
document.writeln("<h1>RAID is not a backup</h1>");
}
document.close();

Sorry!
Ok, I didnt mean a real backup as in safe for all eternity.
But it would ensure that in the event of (a single) drive failure my data would be still safe. Wouldnt even need to hot swap the drive.

The reason im asking is when a drive goes (had two go dead on me now) all its data is gone. RAID1 seems to be able to counter this effect without having the need to clone/backup the data. It just dumps it to two different hdds.

But Ive decided not to bother with RAID1 just because of the cost/effort needed.
Ill just make a copy of the data onto another hdd and update it every now and again.

Thanks for all your help

Yours Truly
K

Just to add my tuppence in here (because it pains me to see the words 'RAID' and 'Backup' close together without a strong negative in between!), RAID shouldn't be classed as backup no.
RAID1 adds redundancy - as you say, if one disk dies, then you still have one hard drive with the data on, and can carry on working. However, this isn't backup. For instance, if you were to accidentally shift-delete a folder, got a particularly malicious virus, or suffered a RAID controller issue, then you could still be up a creek...

I'd advocate the copying of important files to an external hard drive on a regular schedule as a better option, and even keeping this offsite if possible .

Personally, I use RAID1, have two encrypted 3TB external hard drives that take backups monthly (one is kept offsite at any time), and also use a cloud storage provider to backup documents and photos. Yes that's probably overkill, but it's all setup and requires little effort on my part (I switch the hard drives when I can, but I don't class that as so urgent, as none of it's mission critical stuff!).

Hope that helps though!