Advice for buying and setting up 2 internal HDDs for data and backup using RAID

UberTiger · 28 Apr 2015 at 13:36

Hey all,

I'd like to get a couple of 4TB drives to put in my desktop for all my data backup in addition to a couple of SSD's I have.

Ideally I'd like to be able to save everything to one drive and have it automatically backed up to the second drive.

In the eveng that a hard drive fails, I can just buy a new one, swap out the dead one and be back up and running with 2 again.

Would RAID 1 be the best for this?

I have an Asus Maximus VII Gene mobo, it says it supports RAID 0,1,5,10

If I were to get 2 hard drives is it just a driver that I have to install to get it up and running?

In terms of disks I see that Hitachi seem to have the lowest failure rates at the moment, would a desktar be a good choice then?

Any input is appreciated

Gambisk · 28 Apr 2015 at 14:09

I'm in a similar position, all that I can add is that my research has brought me to the same hard disk choice. And yes RAID 1 is what you want for mirroring the drives.

As for drivers/bios settings I don't know.

vanandjuanunited · 28 Apr 2015 at 14:14

Problem with mirroring is if the data corrupts on one drive then all you have is a copy of that.

UberTiger · 28 Apr 2015 at 14:26

Hmm...what's the likelihood of data corrupting?

I mean, it's not life or death data that I'll have, and the really important stuff will also be backed up in either Dropbox or Google drive.

How would you get around the corruption issue? I'm guessing another form of RAID that requires more drives? I've only got room for 2 x 3.5" drives in my case.

Well, I have 3 really, but one is a hot swappable drive bay, so would rather leave that free if I can.

Ch3m1c4L · 28 Apr 2015 at 14:36

Hitachi or WD red's drives are good choices.
Buy drives, install, enter bios and enable raid. During boot up press the key combo it tells you to, set up raid 1 mirror using both disks, boot to windows, format drives.

However, raid is not a backup solution. It only protects against hard drive failure. So as above, corruption etc gets mirrored, and if you delete files accidentally, they are gone from both.

You may well be better off running them normally, and using something like robo copy or some other file copying/backup software which you can have it copy every week or so.

Or get one 4TB and a larger drive, then store an image + changes to the image in proper backup formats.

Then again, if you're using onedrive/dropbox/googledrive for all the important stuff like photos/docs and then the rest is all games/downloads etc, raid 1 is fine and means you can carry on as normal while you replace a failed drive etc.