[SOLVED] Raid 1 for video file storage

[Staybegind]

Hello everyone,
I am making videos for youtube. I record games, upload them to youtube and store them on my hard drive. Youtube keeps the videos, but I feel safer if I still have the videos in case youtube would delete my videos ir was shut down or we are in a war and there is no more internet. Anyway, at first I was storing my videos in a Seagate 1TB Hard drive. It failed, could not start anymore. I brought it for recovery, paid a lot of money and got the videos "recovered" as the files were there, but could not be played normally. So I found out that WD Purple is much more reliable. Got a 3TB WD purple. It worked fine, but it got full. Decided to get an expansion, got a 8TB WD Purple. So it makes this clicking noise every 5 seconds. WD website says, that it is normal and it is only doing something to prolong it's life. So anyway, i believe them, but still started to think what if it failed again. So I found this Raid 1 method, where you use two disks to copy files from one to another to keep them safer. Now everywhere I see, it says that it is only redundant, but it is not a back up of files. I understand that it does not protect from human error like deletion or viruses, but these are not the things, that scare me. I only care about hardware failure. Is there any smarter way to make the second hard drive as a back up, or am I good RAID 1? Sorry for the long story and thank you for your insights.

 

[Nine Layer Nige]

You can use CrystalDiskInfo to check the HDD health status on a regular basis. If its got a big fat green OK. Yellow will display potential erorrs and red is bad.

Also, if you dont want to raid, then you could simply "Select All" on your source 8TB and copy to your backup HDD, then Windows will decide and show an option where you select the Dont overwrite existing files and it will only copy over the new ones since last time.
or if you do it on a regular weekly or monthly basis, you will know which ones need to be copied over.
Other than that there are many 3rd party backup utilities which may be appropriate.

Hope that helps.

 

[USAFRet]

RAID 1 is for continued uptime, in the event of a physical drive fail.
And it does not "copy" files between the two drives.
The OS and the user sees but one single copy of this data.

Physical drive death is only one of the ways to lose data. And not even the most prevalent.

Don't focus on that aspect only.

And RAID 1 must also be supplanted with a real backup routine. Many ways to do that.
If you can suffer through an hour or so of downtime, the RAID 1 is not needed.

 

[little_me]

I can admit that at one point, I ran disks in Raid1/mirrored to back them up.
after losing things on both sets (2x250gb and 2x500gb, it was years ago) both times due to data corruption (due to software OR hardware) I abandoned it for separate disk backups.
while said setup protected me two? three? times from physical disk failure, it is only a matter of time before bits get scrambled.

As Usafret says, backups... they are important.

 

[geofelt]

If your concern is drive failure, change out the hard drives for samsung qvo drives.
They come in sizes up to 8tb.
They have had virtually no failures at puget systems:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hardware-reliability-puget-systems-2021

I suppose you could also use raid 1 or raid 5.

If you go the ssd route, why not use the hard drives as external backup?

 

[Staybegind]

Thank you for your answers, I've decided to just buy another 8TB HDD drive and copy my files to both of them. I did not bother with NAS or some similar solutions and will hope to not catch a virus 😀