Hello,
I've been researching RAID until my head hurts too much to continue. Days of reading is causing blurry vision.
I've got a small business with 3 mission critical computers. We deal with thousands of raw and jpg files each week. Every time I have a mobo or boot drive failure, it takes way too long to get everything operational again.
I had a mobo raid with boot drives mirrored but the chip failed and it was nice to simply plug in one drive and we're up and running again. Neglected to buy a raid card to replace it, now the boot drive has failed -ouch. Nothing lost, just time.
Question is this: should I go for a cheapie raid card (1220) and just mirror the boot drives and have an extra card on hand? Or - spend more and put all 4 one or two TB drives onto one better raid card with one drive as a hot spare. The 2420 has so much more features that would be well worth it for me BUT, since I'm a bit anal, it means that I need to have a spare 2420 on hand in case of failure. I can't wait a few days for one to arrive. Now, we're talking $600. more (for 2 of each)than the 1220 solution but if I never have another day of downtime, it's well worth it for me.
Problems: I'd like to get a card that will handle SATA III (to future proof) but hard to find a reliable one.
I am not interested in NAS or any back-up plans. I have that for data but need a boot drive solution. SSDs are not much benefit to me since the system is left on all the time and they can fail also.
Thanks, Doug
I've been researching RAID until my head hurts too much to continue. Days of reading is causing blurry vision.
I've got a small business with 3 mission critical computers. We deal with thousands of raw and jpg files each week. Every time I have a mobo or boot drive failure, it takes way too long to get everything operational again.
I had a mobo raid with boot drives mirrored but the chip failed and it was nice to simply plug in one drive and we're up and running again. Neglected to buy a raid card to replace it, now the boot drive has failed -ouch. Nothing lost, just time.
Question is this: should I go for a cheapie raid card (1220) and just mirror the boot drives and have an extra card on hand? Or - spend more and put all 4 one or two TB drives onto one better raid card with one drive as a hot spare. The 2420 has so much more features that would be well worth it for me BUT, since I'm a bit anal, it means that I need to have a spare 2420 on hand in case of failure. I can't wait a few days for one to arrive. Now, we're talking $600. more (for 2 of each)than the 1220 solution but if I never have another day of downtime, it's well worth it for me.
Problems: I'd like to get a card that will handle SATA III (to future proof) but hard to find a reliable one.
I am not interested in NAS or any back-up plans. I have that for data but need a boot drive solution. SSDs are not much benefit to me since the system is left on all the time and they can fail also.
Thanks, Doug