RAID 1 for home users

[rcf84]

well i my friend is afraid that he is going to lose data all the time. So he formatting his harddisk. So im thinking of getting him another seagate 30gb harddrive and abit hotrod 100 raid card. I'll put in Raid 1 (mirror). Good or bad move.

Nice Intel and AMD users get a Cookie.... Yummy

 

[Guest]

Is he afraid of losing data to HD failure, software failure (filesystem corruption, etc.), or human failure (ie. deleting things you shouldn't have)?

RAID 1 can protect you from the hard drive failures. But back when I still used windows, I lost much more data to software screwups and occasional human screwups.

RAID is no substitute for a backup strategy.



In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.

 

[Guest]

Well, we use raid 1 at work for our workstations. We have problems with it almost constantly! But when it works, it works very well. Why not just get a cd/rw (if he doesn't have one) and backup on a cd? I mean if he has stuff to save on a daily basis, then you might as well do a raid 1, but if he just wants a backup that is current (ie a week) then a cd works just as well. Either way, it just depends on what he wants to do.

<Common Sense is a gift that some of us have returned.>

 

[Guest]

>Well, we use raid 1 at work for our workstations. We have
>problems with it almost constantly!

What kind of problems?


In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.

 

[Guest]

Well, mainly problems that it won't finish mirroring. Generally we have 3 hard drives - master, mirror1 and mirror2. Most of the times we have to go re-assign something. Sorry I can't be more specific, but I am having a brain fart at this moment!! I guess if you're only using 2 drives it probably wouldn't be a big deal then, huh?

<Common Sense is a gift that some of us have returned.>

 

[Guest]

>Generally we have 3 hard drives - master, mirror1 and
>mirror2.

Wow, you should consider going with RAID 10! Just one more drive and you get nearly RAID 0 speed, twice as much disk space, and a full mirror. You lose some redundancy of course (only one mirror instead of two).

>I guess if you're only using 2 drives it probably wouldn't
>be a big deal then, huh?

I don't know really. What kind of controller are you using? I've just started using RAID for the first time with a 3ware card. And it has been completely transparent.

I've had several improper shutdowns recently due to some stability & power problems. When I go into the 3ware monitoring utility it shows that a rebuild is in process, a few minutes later it finishes and I get my speed back. Very nice.


In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.

 

[Guest]

We put in registers and the server / workstations for different types of stores (mainly health and pet) and what they do is in the morning they switch out mirror 1 with mirror 2 (or vice versa). I believe we use promise controller cards, but I may be mistaken. I'm not in tech support at my place of employment, so I really forgot a lot of what we use. My boss (my mom & dad(well my bf's 'rents)) doesn't really keep up on computers and the latest technology. He also gets pissed when we try to tell him what is new and what we should be using for better performance. Right now we also put cd/rw's in the workstations so that they can copy their db and have it on file. Their db is the most important thing, all of their store information ie. sales history, tax reports, stuff like that. Majority of our customers are aliterate, they do things so backwards that we have 4 different ways for them to backup their data. Mirroring, cd, offsite backup, and backing up to a register. Fun fun fun!


<Common Sense is a gift that some of us have returned.>

 

[Guest]

Ok, that makes more sense.
You always have a live mirror, and a day-old mirror in case a problem screws up both the current drives. You probably aren't at all concerned about performance either.

Not a bad setup if you can get it to work reliably, and no bonehead that doesn't understand the system starts mucking with things in the event the "live" disks go down (ie. they screw up that day old mirror).


In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.

 

[Guest]

Yeah, pretty much.
Well, we're concerned about performance if it's a workstation/server combo, but if it's just a workstation, then we aren't concerned about performance because they are not allowed to use the "dedicated file server". Most of them do anyway though, oh well!

<Common Sense is a gift that some of us have returned.>