Advice on new drives please!

[mentalmike]

I'm looking to buy two new drives - most probably 1T in size. I'm not looking for performance but reliability as I want to run them mirrored for backing up. Reason being I've got about 5 years worth of photos, MP3s, vids etc that I'm useless at backing up. I'm not so bothered at backing up the mp3s of vids but the photos are irreplaceable.

So firstly is this a good idea, have two drives mirrored, one fails I've got the rest on the second and can just get a new drive and start again?

If I’m correct with the above my second point it that my PC isn't the most newest - 2500xp over clocked to 3200xp on an epox 8rda+ so old! Thing is I know new stuff is cheap but I don't use my PC enough any more to justify a new PC so my main question here is are there any decent expansion raid sata cards that don't cost the world that would be ok for my machine?

Third question if the first two points seem ok is which drives to get? As I said speed isn't an issue, just reliability and looking at 2 1T drives as I don't really want to run out of space any time soon!

Any advice would be great, as you can see I haven't played with the insides of a PC for a bit!!

 

[rpstewart]

So firstly is this a good idea, have two drives mirrored, one fails I've got the rest on the second and can just get a new drive and start again?

As long as you understand the limitations of RAID1 it's fine. It will provide you with the ability to keep running in the event of a disk failure but nothing else. If you delete a file from the array it's deleted on both disks.

are there any decent expansion raid sata cards that don't cost the world that would be ok for my machine?

There are plenty of PCI SATA cards out there, most of which support RAID1. There's no real point in spending £50+ on an Adaptec card when a generic Taiwanese card will do the same job just as well.

Third question if the first two points seem ok is which drives to get? As I said speed isn't an issue, just reliability and looking at 2 1T drives as I don't really want to run out of space any time soon!

The Samsung F1s are the cheapest 1Tb drives at the moment but there are quite a few reports of problems (only appearing as 33Mb etc) but on the other hand there are plenty of folk happy with them.

 

[Tomsk]

If the photos are irreplaceable, then you should go for a better backup solution, rather than rely on RAID1.
With RAID1, if your PC 'dies' (eg. fire, theft) you still lose everything.
You want a backup that can be stored securely away from the PC.

I use a portable HD - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=14&subid=170 - that I backup my data with and then I take it to work.

 

[Pandobear]

You are much better backing the files up using an external drive as Tomsk says, use a scheduled backup software to ensure that you don't have to remember to backup everyday, or look at one of the cheap Windows Home Servers, which will give you both extra storage, but also backup all of your PCs

 

[bledd]

use 1 internal, 1 external

robocopy the folders (pics and music) once a day

 

[clocka]

Raid1 is best in my oppinion and a 8GB Usb pen, keep photos on the usb pen aswell as the raid1 array.