RAID 0 BackUp?

[mtwieck]

Can anyone offer any advice on what software to use to do an Image backup of a RAID 0 array?

I'm running Vista Ultimate on an X58 motherboard with two Velociraptor HDDs. I'm starting to think that a RAID setup might be more trouble than it's worth!

Any advice offered would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, in advance to all who reply.
Mike,

 

[alvine]

raid 5 is basically raid 0 with a backup drive

 

[tomatthe]

If you are doing an image backup it shouldn't really matter that its on a raid set. Ghost or imagex/dism.exe or whatever you want to use should be fine. If you are capturing the image from within a winpe or similar environment you will need the drivers for the raid controller on the boot cd though.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Tomatthe is right. My two cents: A RAID setup is more trouble than it is worth. I've posted ad nauseum on other threads that RAID should only be used for two reasons
1) If it solves a particular issue for you.
2) If you want to have fun and learn things playing around with it.

I have played with RAID. I have owned an 8-drive rackmount RAID subsystem, so long ago that the host interconnect was Ulstrascsi 320. My system drives are not in RAID.

There is only one thing on my system that is mirrored. My mail file is write-mirrored to a file on another disk, using MirrorFolder. With everything else, if I have to fall back to my last backup, I can still live with myself. Or I copy it to a USB stick I keep handy for the purpose.

 

[WyomingKnott]

raid 5 is basically raid 0 with a backup drive

From a functional standpoint, this may be true. But RAID 5 requires parity calculations, either done in a more expensive controller or pushed off to the CPU, introducing delays into your writes.

Rant: Raid 0 is not RAID. The "R" stands for "Redundant." zero has no redundancy; it is the only RAID level where all data is lost when one spindle fails. Do not use RAID 0 for anything you are not prepared to lose.