A question on building hdds.

[alidan]

now most people care about the security of their infromation.
most people cant set up a raid.
i have attempted and gave up in the past, and i consider myself fairly knolageable. granted i wanted the computer NOW so i didnt take to much time after failing to get a raid set up a few times.

now, that said. is there any specific reason this doesnt exist.

we have a sata cable to the mother board
a power cable,

than why not after the power
a second sata cable, and a switch, for 1 and 2

the second one would plug into a second hdd, and it would be an exact as it gets mirror of the first hdd, setting the switch from 1 to 2 determines master and slave relationships.

is there a reason something like this doesn't exist?
and think if this from someone who cant set a raid up position.

 

[Rusting In Peace]

Because having cables does not drive raid controllers or specific raid levels. What if I accidentally plug the cables in the wrong way? A RAID array build might kick off. It might destroy my data that I need.

There is no such thing as master / slave in SATA nor RAID.

It's good that you are thinking of ways that RAID setups can be simplified though.

 

[alidan]

you are thinking to much about this. this is simply a way to mirror data, not increase performance, like any raid does.

1hdd has a sata to the mobo, a power and another sata to a 2nd hdd.
the second hdd only has the power and the sata to the former hdd.

 

[Rusting In Peace]

RAID is more than just increasing performance. I have RAID 1 and RAID 5 for redundancy. Couldn't give two hoots about performance increases for these arrays!

In your system all you've done is move cable connectors around. What would you propose the storage controller would do? Is the motherboard controller simply extended to recognize the secondary disk and writes and reads from both drives?

 

[jsc]

you are thinking to much about this. this is simply a way to mirror data, not increase performance, like any raid does.

Mirroring is RAID1.

 

[alidan]

Mirroring is RAID1.

raid 0 for one.

RAID is more than just increasing performance. I have RAID 1 and RAID 5 for redundancy. Couldn't give two hoots about performance increases for these arrays!

In your system all you've done is move cable connectors around. What would you propose the storage controller would do? Is the motherboard controller simply extended to recognize the secondary disk and writes and reads from both drives?

the way im seeing it the mirror would be controlled by the hdd, and even if the hdds were to be switched it would still function because its just a complete mirror.

now, for starting this up, im thinking a dvd boot would be necessary, or if a hdd crashed, a dvd boot for the innitial mirror process, after than its more or less an automatic process.

 

[Rusting In Peace]

raid 0 for one

What do you mean?

The problem with the hard drive being the storage container is increased costs and increased complexity. Every HDD must now ship with a controller which makes hard drives more expensive. The complexity increases as now a hard drive must not only deal with it's own failed writes it must process another and pass that information back to the storage controller on the motherboard or raid card to deal with.

So in this DVD boot process you are now setting up the drives and telling the main drive to mirror itself onto the secondary drive. After this is complete the storage controller on the main drive will now ensure the mirror is up to date.

This isn't miles away from RAID1 configuration on a raid card you know...

 

[alidan]

What do you mean?

The problem with the hard drive being the storage container is increased costs and increased complexity. Every HDD must now ship with a controller which makes hard drives more expensive. The complexity increases as now a hard drive must not only deal with it's own failed writes it must process another and pass that information back to the storage controller on the motherboard or raid card to deal with.

So in this DVD boot process you are now setting up the drives and telling the main drive to mirror itself onto the secondary drive. After this is complete the storage controller on the main drive will now ensure the mirror is up to date.

This isn't miles away from RAID1 configuration on a raid card you know...

last time i tried to set up a raid, i failed multiple times and gave up, i wanted the computer to work right than and there. now, this is experience with Seagate harddrive tools.

mirroring a harddrive is about as simple as it gets with that. what im thinking is that with in os tools you could set everything up, it would reboot and do its thing, than reboot again when the process is done, and its all over. its simple to do, that even someone who has next to no idea what they are doing in a computer could do it.

now, i'm assuming that this would cost a slight bit more. but we aren't looking at reinventing the wheel more expensive. i'm assuming that it could be done to 5-20$ more a drive at worst. 20 on the first generation, and probably half that on the second. and for an easy "fool proof" mirror method that is basically i set it up and forget an extra 10-20 a drive isn't bad imo.

 

[ssddx]

setting up a raid took me all of 5 minutes.

quite a few newer motherboards support raid 0,1 & 5 without an external raid controller. some even include a raid setup process that is as easy as A + B = C.

why would we want to increase the complexity and price tag on drives when the obvious solution is in making sure motherboards ship with an easier to use raid set up tool? for someone seeking simplification you are taking the more complex route.

if you want an example of an excellent raid set up included on a motherboard look at the Asus Rampage III (what i have). put the system together, turn it on, push an F button down and the raid setup will load. if every manufacturer included such tools then raid would be that much simpler.

the best part is... it would cost practically nothing to implement. i'll take that over your proposed $20 increase.
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Data mirroring is Raid 1. both hard drives contain the same information. no performance gains, good for backing up data.

data striping is Raid 0. both hard drives contain only parts of the total information. increased performance gains, bad for reliablility.

 

[WyomingKnott]

last time i tried to set up a raid, i failed multiple times and gave up, i wanted the computer to work right than and there. now, this is experience with Seagate harddrive tools.

mirroring a harddrive is about as simple as it gets with that. what im thinking is that with in os tools you could set everything up, it would reboot and do its thing, than reboot again when the process is done, and its all over. its simple to do, that even someone who has next to no idea what they are doing in a computer could do it.

now, i'm assuming that this would cost a slight bit more. but we aren't looking at reinventing the wheel more expensive. i'm assuming that it could be done to 5-20$ more a drive at worst. 20 on the first generation, and probably half that on the second. and for an easy "fool proof" mirror method that is basically i set it up and forget an extra 10-20 a drive isn't bad imo.

Maybe that is so, but that's not how it's done. With no offense meant, your argument that it could be done that way for a few dollars more (sorry) and it would be easy may be technically valid, but it's like saying that Betamax is as good as VHS. VHS is the way things were done.

So the way that things are done is that RAID is done at the controller level, or the OS level to save money in exchange for a few CPU cycles. If you want to set up RAID1 (mirroring to make your system survive a single drive crash), you have to do the RAID the way the system designers intended. If you want to mirror your OS drive, you have to do it at the BIOS level.

You can mirror data drives via Windows Disk Management if you want. This resembles what you described in the second paragraph. It's an OS tool (built into the OS), you select two drives and indicate that you want to mirror across them, and I don't think that you even have to do a reboot.

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This thread started with "Now most people care about the security of their information." RAID1 is not the way to improve the security of your information. It just makes the system more resilient, and proof against a single failure of one particular type (loss of the drive). Those of us who care about not losing our data make backups. If we are really concerned with the survivability of our data, we keep offsite backups.

None of this is meant to criticize you. You have identified a need, and proposed a solution. However, I suggest that you benefit from the many years of experience that people on this board have, and consider that the entire computer-using world, as a group, may have better insights into the survivability of data.

BTW, "security" usually means protecting data from access or destruction by unauthorized parties. That is a different subject, and RAID is not relevant.

BTW2, if all you want to do is protect certain data against loss when a hard drive fails, you can user MirrorFolder instead of Raid1. It is easier to set up, but more expensive and uses more CPU cycles than true RAID.