raid on a home windows pc

[hippoman]

well I keep changing my mind but I ma now thinking of just getting a couple of 1tb drives. setting them up in raid 1 (mirrored) then next month getting another one, breaking the mirror and going for raid 5. I'm sure this will provide a decent compromise.

Cheers for all the advice.

[shaithis]

The problem with doing that is you will lose all you data when creating the raid 5 array.

Creating arrays destroys the data on the disks, as a general rule of thumb anyway.

[hippoman]

I agree raid isn't a backup solution (I've seen raid 0 array lose a disk, recover it (with corruption) then mirror the corruption back onto the good disk) however should provide some resiliency and to be honest I just want to have a play with raid.

[hippoman]

shaithis - of course. it will be a totally different structure. ah well scratch that idea.

I have this urge to do something a bit different... I've always liked raid but it might be a bit of overkill to try and set up something complicated on my home machine.

I worked with one server once which had a ridiculous level of resilience.
There were two servers at seperate ends of the site with seperate power sources. each one had a pair of raid controllers but they were duplexed so one raid array on one machine was mirrored with one on the other server and the same for the other array. The idea is that anything can fail and the system would stay up.

[shaithis]

RAID can be overkill, it depends on your needs.

For me, I keep a LOT of data hanging around for various reasons, I like to feel that the data is safe but I do not want to be backing it up regularly (yes, raid is not a replacement for backups but as long as you understand the differences it can 90% replace a backup solution - meaning far fewer backups), I also do not want to have a ton of data offline waiting to be restored in the event of a drive failure.

I've been running RAID5 on my home PC for around 5 years now, started off with a 3ware PCI card with 3x 160GB drives and then migrated that to my current Areca PCI-E card with 4 x 320GB drives. In that time I have had 3 drive failures (1 x 160GB drive and 2 x 320GB drives) and haven't been inconvenienced in the slightness from those failures. That's what your paying for and if you do not need that, then save a lot of money and don't bother

[hippoman]

thanks. some good advice there. I'm still considering a raid 5 array but but I don't think I'm going to bother with any striping for the os.

I've generally been pretty lucky with disk failures. Most of the time they have been gradual and although there may have been little corruption I haven't had a catastrophic total loss.

Do you know if the ich9r is capable of running with a hotspare?

[hippoman]

edit - in reponse to peterb
yeah, maybe it's not worth bothering with on a home system but as I am looking to stetching to a mb with the ich9r southbridge I feel I should make some use of the raid capabilities.

for servers I always go with a minimum of a redunt array (usually raid 5) with a tape backup (grandfather, father, son tape rotation) and always advise tapes to be stored off site.

Unfortunately it is amazing how difficult it can be to persude a customer how important this is (until they suffer a serious failure).

I have some customers who have gone from a total disregard to backups to requiring a thoroughly resilient setup (above option plus a full daily online backup to a mirror server (sometimes virtulised)) after they have had data loss.

If you have a company with, say, 100 users and you lose a whole day you have just lost thousnds of pounds of man hours. Enough to pay for a pretty decent backup solution.

[peterb]

edit - in reponse to peterb

=====snip======

If you have a company with, say, 100 users and you lose a whole day you have just lost thousnds of pounds of man hours. Enough to pay for a pretty decent backup solution.

Yes indeed! Afte my close call (I was quoted £350 yowards to recover the data - but actually got it back myself, I invested in a tape system on the grounds that it only cost a little more than the data recovery might have cost. Again one can argue overkill for a home system - but makes backups trivially easy!

I certainly wouldn't wnat to discourage you from playing with Raid to see what suits you (or to learn about it) but I hope the postws have pointed some of the snags (and benefits!). Good luck!