How best to add HDD redundancy to my only PC?

[BlueScream]

I have one PC, and don't access any files on it from other machines or devices ever. It is built around an i7-930, has 6GB Ram, has 3 HDD in it, and still does everything I need to do fine except for one thing ...

Ideally I'd like to have some way of not having to restore from backup when a HDD in it dies, which I gather would mean having real-time HDD redundancy in my machine (will continue to backup, am not looking to replace backup, just to make needing to use them for large restores less likely).

Simplest solution seems to be software raid 1 via Windows (Windows 7) for every HDD - (other raids intimidate me a little so I'm much more comfortable with solutions where the HDDs can just be pulled out and used in another machine rather than risking being unable to rebuild an entire proper raid array).

As number of HDDs expands maybe something like the real-time flexraid option might be worth moving to so less HDDs are lost to creating the redundancy I'm looking for.

As it's the machine I do everything on I don't want to take much of a performance hit, is there a solution that I'm missing? You guys know much more than me about this stuff, how would you meet this requirement in this situation and what solution would you move to as the amount of data needing redundancy increased? Do people build file servers/NAS for this reason even to serve only one machine?

Thanks

[shaithis]

Having not used windows software raid for quite a while, I may be incorrect but I believe it requires you to convert your current disks to dynamic disks, which then cannot be used in another machine until they are wiped.

You best bet would probably be raid 1 from the onboard controller. This is "safe" for you as RAID1 shouldn't add anything to the disk layout (all it does it directly replicate the disk1 to disk2), meaning you could pull EITHER disk in the array and use it in another machine with all data intact....or as you are looking for, pull either disk and put a fresh one in and let it rebuild.

Having not setup RAID1 on an intel controller (oddly, as I have done RAID0 countless times!) I cannot tell you if it's stupid enough to wipe the current drive contents....although there wouldn't be any need to.

Might be worth trying if you had a couple of spare drives around.

[peterb]

It depends how much you want to spend....

Ideal solution is to use asepatate HDD controller card and run your RAID arrays off that. That way you won't take any performance hit at all (you might get an improvement.

RAID 1 mirrors disks, so you have 100% redundancy. Drive fails, swap it out and it rebuilds.

However that would mean an additional three disks, and as you will be initialising each disk, so you will have to restore from your backups.

RAID 5, as you probably know, uses n+1 disks, so you would need one additional drive, but again you need to initialise the disks to form the array, and then restore from backups.

I do use a full software RAID (1) on a linux system. I don't notice any performance hit on a relatively low powered system. It is possible to read data off a disk, but only under the same software that was used to create the array because it needs to read the array metadata.

I have not used hybrid hardware/software systems, so I can't comment on performance issues, but you would probably need another machine with the same hardware and software configuration to read a disk from your existing machine. The same holds true of course for a separate hardware card.

[DanceswithUnix]

A NAS sounds like an easy way forward. You have a storage problem, storage is what a NAS does.

Personally I hate doing anything other than simple installs on Windows because, every now and then, you need to wipe it. New motherboard, OS upgrade, or it just had a bit of a moment and now won't boot.

[BlueScream]

Thanks for the advice everyone, will think it all over.