How pointless is Mirror RAID? Not much of a backup utility!

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L1qu1d

L1qu1d

Splendid
Sep 29, 2007
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Offcourse I have been dealing with computers since the beginning of the Quake years and performance was always first before pleasure...Screw up? Obviously yes.
But let me ask you how pointless mirror RAID is. You take the time and money to buy another hard drive expecting something big and more room, which means...yes more movies games and no more concern for not having enough space on the hard drive.

Raid 0 enables more performance for people like me it's worth the risk of data loss. but what about Raid 1?Performance increase....no, Space increase....no, Anticipation for something new...no and worth the money...again no.

If your planning on usuing Raid 1 as a backup option please strike that off immediately. Think about it, it's called MIRROR...so for example if you fell down the stairs broke your arm and legs and looked in the mirror you would have a back up of yourself in perfect condition ( lol perfect condition yea right) THE ANSWER IS NO!!!!!

You'll see yourself damage and your gonna cry. Same thing goes with RAID 0 if you get a virus on 1 hard drive, you get 1 on the other. If you get a corrupt Windows file you get it on the other hard drive.

Nice backup? I thought so.

The only thing it would EVER and I mea EVER be good for is incase 1 hard drive fails. Thats it. But are you paying an extra sum of money just to wait for a day where your hard drive just fails? Or are you gonna live it up and either get more space or some more performance:)


Sorry just had to vent real quick:)
Hopefully ppl agree with me !
 


Yes, that is what RAID 1 is for. If you want to backup files for storage you should:

Get an external drive and store it away
Get an internal drive and store it away
Burn your data to DVD/HDDVD/BR and store it away
Tape drives
There are also online backup solutions these days
floppy disks!

I dont think anyone ever claimed that RAID1 was good for permant backups.
 
I beg to differ here.. I dont think RAID 1 should be considered as a replacement for taking backups.. RAID 1 is used for high availability.. even with RAID 1 you still have to take regular backups to counter condition of virus attacks, data corruption etc.

RAID 1 handles only one thing and that is High Availability in case of HDD failure.. So if you have a failure in one harddisk the second one (mirror) takes over and work continues till you can plan a down time to replace the faulty disk.

So lets not confuse the the purpose of RAID 1. I agree with L1qu1d in that RAID 1 being used as a backup solution is a waste of money.
 
You take the time and money to buy another hard drive expecting something big and more room,
Click to expand...

The problem is not with RAID 1 - it is with the expectations of the person :)

RAID 1 has it's place and purpose - as everyone stated, it is NOT for performance or for space. It is for high availability (as atreyu stated).

I use RAID 1 - to minimize the possibility of my machine being down when I need it.
* If my HDD crashes and I have to restore my data from backups and install all the necessary apps that I need and the updates that I need, it will take me at least a few hours and that is not something that I can usually afford when I am in the middle of my work.
* Even if I restore from a Ghost backup, it could take me an hour or two - again, not something that I can usually afford when I am in the middle of my work.
* Besides, in either of these solutions, all work that I've done since my last backup is gone!

This is why I use RAID 1. That is what I expect from it and RAID 1 serves the purpose!
Is it possbile that both my drives get fried at the same time? Sure it is possible! But as I stated, my expectations are to minimize (not eliminate) the possibility of my machine being down :)

Just thought I'd share my thoughts about this
 
I agree with jj14 & atreyu.
It's not pointless in the datacenter enviroment. We use cold/standby mirror for our system disk drives for OS & application patching. That saves us hours, days of work for patch roll back.
 
I remember when we were putting a SAN in at work a number of years ago, one of the managers kept going on about how it was going to save backup costs because the SAN was redundant 8 ways to Sunday.

He just could not get the concept, despite how many people told him, that backups were not just for hardware failure.
 
Hmm... I don't see how you save $$$.
In a corporate world, if a system goes down, it will costs a company thousands of dollars per hour. How much does it costs for an additional 36GB SCSI hard drive? How much does it costs for users couldn't access to the system application? How often an application won't starts up after application upgrade or a security patch, etc... It's price less compares to a the costs for an additional SCSI disk drive. Let not talk about the yelling/screaming from the management. RAID 1 has the capability that RAID 0&5 could not provide. Raid1 provides an instant patch roll back, it's close to transparent to the end users, more productive. It's not LOL when a system goes down and the employer still paying hundreds of employees sitting in their office being unproductive.
 
RAID 1 is for Redundancy, not Backup.

As stated for instance, if you get a virus on a RAID 1 array, bingo! you have the virus on both drives.

Many times people see the term "redundancy" and relate it as a form of backup, which it is not!

It simply means that if a drive physically dies, the system stays up until you can replace the bad drive.
 


One of the ways to get around this is to actually take the RAID 1 array and partition it into two (primary and backup). Install everything you need onto the primary and then, install Ghost on the primary and specify the backup destination to be the backup partition.
The advantage is that now, you are better protected against hardware problem (single drive failure) and software issues (virus, malware, corrupted install, accidental deletion of files). If one of your drives fail, just replace it (your system works in the meanwhile). If your system gets infected with a virus and you are not able to get it out, just restore the most recent Ghost backup from your 'backup' partition onto your 'primary' partition and you are good to go! If you accidentally deleted some file which you need, just go into the Ghost explorer and restore the file you need!

Do note that this is NOT a substitute for regular (daily) backups onto external storage (in case both drives fail or your RAID controller goes south)
HTH
 


I was talking about this at a personal level....wow such hard emotion dude....I'm just saying for the most part I would rather have space and performance then to wait and get my money's worth when my Hard drive fails....let me rephrase that IF my hard drive fails.

 
I'd say it would be more designed for a business machine, rather then a home user, but still could be used. If it needs to be up 24/7, that would be the best way to go, business wise. Other then that, for a regular home user... naaaah. :lol:
 
Apparently you don't understand what RAID is used for then. If you do, then you should state it in your 1st post. Good to let n00bs know what to expect though! They can always use the help
 
 
"Performance increase....no"

ON the contrary! Depending on the controller, you can have a nice read performance increase. Both disks have the same information on it, so a good controller would use both disks to read. Write speeds would still be single-disk speed.
 


Who are you talking to right now??? If its me yes I dont know RAID all the well but I know thats pointless for me to spend money on a product that may or may not get used. I'd raid Raid 0 for performance or use the drives seperatly rather than RAID 1

The only thing I might consider using Mirror RAID would be RAID 0+1 and Have 4 Hard drives:) but even for that I'm iffy.

 
If one is really clever ...

Set up a Raid 1 placing the drives in hot swap bays.

Now you can do a backup simply by swapping out the "mirror" from the hot swap bays and letting the RAID rebuild.

Recovering the system is as simple as removing both drives and swapping in one of the good backups, swapping in a "mirror" to be rebuilt.

A bit more expensive than the solutions I use, but perhaps suitable for some.
 
I've been talking about the real uses for RAID for quite awhile now. RAID1 is not a backup solution. This is the easier one for people to understand. I also "preach" about why most people don't need AID0. People still think AID0 pays off for gaming, which is mostly CPU and GPU bound. I've seen people buy two harddrives and a soundcard while at the same time buying a midrange CPU and videocard. I'd tell them to drop the SC and second harddrive to they could move from the 7600GT to the 7950/x1950xt, but they keep telling me its about load time and sound quality. Me, I'd rather have the increased frame rate and resolution.

Welcome to the club. Keep talking about the real uses for RAID1, perhaps someday we won't be viewed as the weirdos.
 


Personally I think it is also a good idea to have redundancy for a system with RAID 1, because you can still have your computer working even for 1 HDD failure. You just don't have to IMMEDIATELY go for a DHL of a HDD and manually do a system restore after a HDD disaster. With RAID 1, what you do is just wait for the DHL of the new HDD, plug the new drive in, and the RAID controller does the new redundancy to the new drive for you, with the system still on during the period from you order the new drive to the ending of new redundancy. No fear of any data lost, no need to do a long period of system restore immediately after a drive failure, no worry to the unavailability of the system after a HDD failure, all these just for a cost of an extra HDD and a RAID controller. It worths a lot for somebody, just not you maybe...

RAID 1 is not intended to replace a system and data backup, and should not be use for it. It is totally another thing.
 
Honestly, your thread title is indicative of ignorance of the subject matter. RAID was never meant for back up, it has always been about redundancy / performance (with an asterisk on perfomance). And it has long been really intended for the server market as a solution to avoid downtime in case of drive failure and never for back up of data, so stop with this senseless nonsense (redundant, I know)
 
I've always wondered about RAID 1 and never used it. We use RAID 0 in most of our systems. We're system builders (not many RAID systems sold to customers) and have only had 10 hard drives fail in the past 7 yrs and 1000s of systems.

Then last week.. I installed folding at home on our 8 systems, including the server. 3 Western Digital Caviars bit the dust in a matter of 7 days, including the one on the server.

Now we use Acronis, so luckily we were just out the 30 mins to recover each image and the 10 mins per machine to replace the hard drives. As far as I'm concerned, Acronis's True Image and Disc Director Suite paid for themselves twice over this week.

My question is, if we'd had these systems on RAID 1 how long would it have taken to rebuild the RAID arrays and be back in business?

I can't help but think Acronis or Ghost would be a better way to go since the 2nd hard drive isn't running until you actually need it. I'd have still been using a 3 yr old hard drive with RAID 1. Whereas with the image I was installing a brand new NCQ drive. Unless rebuilding the array can cut some serious time off the 30 mins to recover the image, I don't see the point in RAID 1 in this day/age. :s
 
I don't see the point in RAID 1 in this day/age.
Click to expand...

Mostly true. With removable storage as easy as it is, there isn't much point to RAID1. Plug it in, back up the data/reimage the drive, then power it down.

The only people who really need RAID1 that I can think of are those that offer "real time" hosting of files. If Amazon's webserver lost a harddrive for whatever reason, how many millions of dollars would they lose even if the were copying the image over? How many millions of dollars would Ebay, Amazon, etc lose in just 10min? How many customers would be upset if their webserver (which they paid extra money for five 9's service.) went down for 10min? Not only did they lose money during that 10min, but can you say contract violation?

Does your home user REALLY need RAID1? Not really, but there are people out there that do.

As a side note, to those serveral posts up, ease up on this. I can see from your low post count that you might not read these forums that much. If you don't believe us, take a look and see how many people come in here asking about RAID1 as a "safety measure" or backup solution. It does happen. We might know that its a bunch of hooey, but not everyone does.
 
But um.. even the real time hosting sites need to rebuild the array before it goes back online?

If that's the case, then it really doesn't matter if they're restoring an image via Acronis/Ghost or rebuilding the array via RAID 1. Unless of course RAID 1 is much faster, which is still my question. How long does it take to rebuild a RAID 1 array? Or even a RAID 5/6/10 array?

BTW, post count doesn't mean anything. I've been reading this forum and getting the newsletter pretty much since it started ('96?). My post count would be a bit higher if I hadn't changed email addys a couple times forcing a new SN, but the number of times I post has nothing to do with how much I read. In fact, I probably learn more reading than someone who spends half their day posting. :)
 
Ya know, if you don't need/want it, don't use it? The OP is like someone complaining that they're not getting any increase in performance with SLI when they're still playing games at 1024x768.

There is a purpose for RAID-1 just like there is a purpose for RAID-0, RAID-5, and RAID-10. It just so happens that RAID-1 fits the needs of some people. Just because YOU don't see a need for it in YOUR life doesn't mean it's not extremely helpful to someone else.
 
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