Raid? Mirror? wt?

[MarkTheNoob]

So guys, I'm a videographer by trade and I'm always a bt nervous about a hard drive dying on me so I've been thinking about putting my drives in some sort of raid but obviously I know bugger all about it.

So,what is raid? and I understand there's different ones like raid 5?

For the record I have (3) all similar Samsung Spinpoint UJ300 1TB drives and had intended getting more as I have anything up to 2.5 TB of high-def guff at a time.

All advice would be appreciated.

Mark G

[strike-down]

As has been said by someone in a previous thread, RAID is not a substitute for backup. If I were you, I'd be getting myself an external hard drive enclosure and putting one of those drives (or a new one) in it.
RAID 1 (mirroring) would be your best bet for data security. That way if one of your drives fails, the data is stored on the second drive and the array can be rebuilt when you install a replacement.
However, if your PSU goes bang (for example) it could knock both your hard drives out, hence the above suggestion.

[shaithis]

It's no substitute for a backup but the resilience it can provide is as good as a backup to a lot of people.....

If the 2.5TB of data the OP talks about is changing a lot, then a backup solution for that could be exhuberantly expensive and a RAID array could offer a good compromise.

I would suggest reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID and then ask any pertinent questions afterwards

[MarkTheNoob]

checked out that wiki entry and it was very ood.think that raid 5 is the way. a load of disks with one lost to contain the parity bits in case of a disk failure. there is mention of using a controller to do the grunt work of reading and writing to keep the workloadoff your cpu. will have to read up more on raid 5 and the controller. thanks guys, another big help.

Mark

[Zak33]

//First time I'd agree with RAID post imminent!

For a lot of Video Editing, RAID could well make your requirements worth doing it!
But backing up is essential and as the guys above have said, if a PSU blew you could lose the lot.

External drives are good, but may I suggest this little beauty?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/IcyBo...D-Black-Colour
It fits into a spare CD drive space on your PC.
On the back are a power connector (to plug into your PSU) and a SATA connector to run a sata data cable to your motherboard.
Then, you can put in and take out SATA drives without taking your PC apart, and THIS means they you can regulary copy your files to a hard drive that you then keep in a safe place in your house.

Then, as hard drives get cheaper and bigger (as they do monthly) just buy a new one, hence always keeping quite regular back ups going.
They are less than £18 inc vat and I have one and so does my old man, and my mate, and we can swap files really fast, between houses when we visit, as well as carry games etc easily cheapily and interchangeably.

So do your RAID thing for SPEED (ie RAID 0) if you want, but this litle beauty could make backing up and moving data dead easy