[SOLVED] Will RAID 1 work with an SSD and HDD, and is that a good choice?

[Wheel in the Sky]

I am building a new computer very soon, and have 2 things I want to accomplish:

1. I would like to use an SSD (only) as the main drive, with everything on the SSD. This is an upgrade from the current HDD-only computer.
2. I would like to not lose any data if the SSD fails.

Cloning the SSD to a backup isn't practical because the clone quickly becomes out of date, and you have to clone all of the data from scratch each time. System images as a backup are great since you can do a quick incremental or differential backup every night. But even then, you can lose a full day's work from drive failure. 1 day may not sound like much, but there are some things you can't reproduce exactly the way you had, like for typing a story or notes all day, or drawing in graphic design software. So I was thinking I would do RAID 1 (mirroring), and have a cheap hard drive mirror the SSD, and just work off of the much faster SSD. I've never done RAID, but now I'm reading that RAID has no concept of "primary drive" and "backup drive." So is it bottlenecked to the slower drive in RAID 1? I was hoping to write to 2 drives, and only read off of the faster one. Is there any way to accomplish that, with or without RAID?

If there is no way to day that, I guess I could shell out for 2 of the same SSD, and run those in RAID 1. An SSD costs about 3-4x as much as a hard drive of the same capacity, but I could do it if it's the only way to get an up-to-the-minute backup with SSD speed. Will RAID 1 work with M.2 NVMe SSD's?

Thanks for reading!

 

[USAFRet]

1. HDD+SSD RAID 1 is a really really bad idea.
2. RAID 1 is not 'backup'. There are much better ways to do this.
3. SSD+SSD RAID 1 is also a bad idea
4. Repeated 'cloning' is also not a good idea for this.

For actual viable backup routines, read here:

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Wheel in the Sky]

1. HDD+SSD RAID 1 is a really really bad idea.
2. RAID 1 is not 'backup'. There are much better ways to do this.
3. SSD+SSD RAID 1 is also a bad idea
4. Repeated 'cloning' is also not a good idea for this.

For actual viable backup routines, read here:

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

1, 3, 4. Got any good ideas for me?
2. If it shields you from losing any data (and even down time) from a drive failure, it's a backup to me! Of course no single backup method is enough on its own though, and I will do a nightly incremental backup to an external drive as well. But to me, not losing any data is the most ideal backup. I see you have some experience in this field, got any advice for my situation? Thanks for weighing in.

 

[USAFRet]

1, 3, 4:
RAID 1 gives you the capacity of the smallest drive, with the performance of the slowest drive.
2. RAID 1 only helps in the event of a physical drive fail. it does nothing for all the other forms of data loss. Accidental deletion, virus, ransomware,other data corruption.

2x NVMe drives in a RAID 1 is simply a waste of a lot of expensive drive space.

Read the first post in that link for a comprehensive backup routine, that actually works.

 

[mdd1963]

Often, It's the user files / photos and saved data that are important....; store those in two cloud locations, and on one spinning drive for local access...

As for backing up the entire OS/data drive.....with a fast SSD, Windows can be freshly reinstalled in 4-5 minutes from USB media, and applications can be done fairly quickly as well, barring too many apps with needed reboots in between...

Copying/imaging the entire drive nightly is an option, but, this can take a while if backing up to a spinning drive...

RAID can provide some protection against one drive failure, but, certainly you don;t want a fast drive crippled in speed by pairing it in any RAID with a much slower spinning drive...

 

[Wheel in the Sky]

1, 3, 4:
RAID 1 gives you the capacity of the smallest drive, with the performance of the slowest drive.
2. RAID 1 only helps in the event of a physical drive fail. it does nothing for all the other forms of data loss. Accidental deletion, virus, ransomware,other data corruption.

2x NVMe drives in a RAID 1 is simply a waste of a lot of expensive drive space.

Read the first post in that link for a comprehensive backup routine, that actually works.

Okay, I though you were asking me to read through 5 pages of people saying they don't do much because they don't have important data. Well, your personal solution limits you to HDD speeds, and RAID 5 is vulnerable to most of the same things RAID 1 is. It does give you an always-current backup though, which is important for me. I figure that by the time you buy 5 HDD's and a RAID 5 controller, and a case, motherboard, and PSU to support all those drives, you may as well get 2 SSD's instead, and enjoy a huge speed increase. But I don't need a ton of space, so it would be a lot bigger price difference if I needed the same 10TB+ available that you have. And I don't think that capacity is even possible with 2 SSD's yet. Plus I'm more of a mini-tower, micro-ATX guy. You have a nice setup, but it's not what I'm trying to accomplish with the new computer.

Anyway, please let me know if I'm understanding this correctly:

1. It is pointless to buy 1 faster, more expensive drive than the other(s) if using any RAID configuration.
2. There is no non-RAID solution that lets you mirror a fast "primary drive" to a slower "backup drive."
3. There is no realistic way to keep a backup updated to the minute other than RAID. So with anything that renders all RAID drives useless at once (power surge, virus, ransomware, etc), you just have to accept some level of data loss (like the current day's work, but you could restore from your most recent system image, which was probably yesterday's incremental).
4. RAID 1 does work for 2 M.2 NVMe SSD's!

My current backup is a manual drag and drop to an external HDD every month or 2, so it's been a lot to learn To think I could have been automating it all this time...

 

[USAFRet]

My backup scenario is not limited to RAID 5 speed. The backups happen nightly. The incrementals take only a minute or two, and happens when I am blissfully asleep. Let the system do all that stuff on its own.

I recently had to recover the totality of a 1TB SSD secondary drive. It was 605GB data. Off the NAS box, over the LAN, it took about 2 hours.
One of the drives died suddenly. Click click...full recovery.
A local drive, even USB connected, would have been much faster.

But a RAID 1 scenario in my system would require another 6 physical drives. Yes, there are multiple drives in this system. Each backed up individually, unattended on a schedule.

A RAID 1 is only really useful if you actually need 24/7 ops. Like if you were running a webstore, and unscheduled downtime = lost sales.
Any business that runs a RAID 1 also has actual backups. If you can suffer through a litle bit of offtime, the RAID 1 is not necessary.

And the software I use, Macrium Reflect, also gives you the functionality of mounting a backup image, either Full or Incremental, as a drive letter.
Takes seconds, and recover a single file or files from whatever day you selected.


The RAID 5 in my NAS is mostly just an experiment. It does ward off loss of a single physical drive. But there is also a total backup of the data on that NAS box.
And I bought the NAS box to also function as a whole house server, for shared files. Movies, music, etc. Not just to hold the backups.
You can scale that scenario down to a single USB drive if desired.

 

[USAFRet]

Bottom line:
Can you do it with 2 similar drives, be they HDD, SSD, NVMe...yes.
Do I think that is a bad idea and waste of drive space? Also yes.

 

[Wheel in the Sky]

New question: do any micro-ATX motherboards support two M.2 SSD's of the same type (both PCIe 3.0x4, or both SATA III)? They appear to only mix the 2 types on a motherboard, not provide 2 of the same kind.

Would RAID 1 work with 1 NVMe SSD and 1 SATA III (no NVMe) SSD's?

 

[USAFRet]

It would 'work', but again, speed of the slowest.
NVMe + SATA III + RAID 1 = SATA III speed.

 

[popatim]

Just get 2 Sata SSD's and mirror those.

 

[Wheel in the Sky]

It would 'work', but again, speed of the slowest.
NVMe + SATA III + RAID 1 = SATA III speed.

Just get 2 Sata SSD's and mirror those.

Yeah, now I'm torn between running 2 SATA III SSD's in RAID 1, or just having 1 NVMe SSD. Either way I would use an exHDD for system image backups as well, and keep a clone HDD elsewhere, just to have a bootable drive, and protect against losing everything entirely. There's a lot to consider: price, speed, and if I really need that oh-so-convenient zero down time and zero data loss from drive failure that RAID 1 provides. With just the single NVMe SSD, a drive failure would mean I have to deal with some down time, restoring to a temporary drive while I wait for a new primary drive replacement to arrive, cloning my data onto it, etc. Plus I lose any data between the time of failure and my last incremental backup. And RAID 1 is far from bulletproof, mostly only protecting from a hardware component on 1 of the RAIDed SSD's giving out, so any other cause of failure forces me to back up from a system image anyway. So is RAID 1 worth the price of an additional SSD, and operating at 3x slower of a speed (SATA III vs NVMe)? Eh, seems like not, but I'll have to decide. I've never had an SSD, so I'm not sure how much SATA III vs NVMe matters for different tasks, but I would think a 3-fold speed increase over SATA III is significant. Maybe in the end I save time from a faster computer even if the drive fails, rather than having a slower system the entire time to ward off the risk of a possible drive failure. Just thinking out loud here...

 

[popatim]

The difference in user perceived speed is not usually 3x unless you happen to work with very large files, not even 2x.
What some users think is their NVME drive in their shiny new PC that is causing it to boot up so fast is really Fastboot and/or Windows10 really sleeping the PC when they click shutdown instead of actually shutting down...

 

[Wheel in the Sky]

The difference in user perceived speed is not usually 3x unless you happen to work with very large files, not even 2x.
What some users think is their NVME drive in their shiny new PC that is causing it to boot up so fast is really Fastboot and/or Windows10 really sleeping the PC when they click shutdown instead of actually shutting down...

Hey pal, I know the difference between sleep mode and shutting down

I think I would benefit a fair amount from NVMe. It's good for video editing, photo editing, and graphic design.

 

[popatim]

Glad you know about W10 not really shutting down, many don't and I agree that an NVME drive would benefit you in those apps.

 

[Wheel in the Sky]

Alright, no RAID 1 for me. I don't think it's worth paying over twice as much in storage, and getting less speed. I'm looking at the 2TB capacity, so I can get an Intel 660p 2TB for probably around $180 during one of the frequent sales. Otherwise I'm looking at buying 2 SATA III SSD's for around $200 each. Over twice the cost, and slower.

For backing up, I will do an internal HDD for incremental backup with system images. It's the closest thing I can get to the mirroring I wanted. Not quite as good, but cheaper, and still fully automated. It's almost like the RAID 1 with 1 SSD and 1 HDD that I originally though I could do XD And I will also do a nightly incremental backup to an external HDD, since it protects from a lot more than an internal HDD does. And just to put ALL of the old HDD's to use, I will keep an old clone on a HDD, just to have something bootable to restore the system image to, if my SSD fails.

Plugging something in every night to run backup software, then unplugging it isn't too time-consuming, and I think this offers great protection at a low price. As long as you have some old HDD's at your disposal.

Thanks for the help coming up with a solution, everyone. I had some learning to do, now that backing up has become more necessary for me.

 

[popatim]

Nice plan!