Raid 5 or alternatives..

Guv

Guv

Guv

Soldato
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I'm considering a raid 5 setup although I still don't know much about it or if it is the best solution.

From what I understand I will have 4 hard drives, all the same capacity, connected to a raid card. The space available will be 3 of the hard drives and the 4th one holds some sort of information that's capable of restoring the data on any of the other drives should one fail.

Is that about right?


Is there a better solution?

I recently had one of my 250gb drives fail which was very frustrating, although luckily it didn't have anything very important on it. Obviously to backup the 750gb+ of data I have to other drives so everything is duplicated seems an expensive and non-efficient way of doing it..


Any advice would be great

thanks
 
Guv said:
I'm considering a raid 5 setup although I still don't know much about it or if it is the best solution.

From what I understand I will have 4 hard drives, all the same capacity, connected to a raid card. The space available will be 3 of the hard drives and the 4th one holds some sort of information that's capable of restoring the data on any of the other drives should one fail.

Is that about right?
Click to expand...
Nearly, what you've described is RAID3 where all the parity is on one disk. With RAID5 the data and parity is evenly distributed across all the disks so in a 4 disk array each disk is 75% data and 25% parity information. Same basic idea just implemented differently.

Guv said:
Is there a better solution?
Click to expand...
Standard answer - it depends....

Guv said:
I recently had one of my 250gb drives fail which was very frustrating, although luckily it didn't have anything very important on it. Obviously to backup the 750gb+ of data I have to other drives so everything is duplicated seems an expensive and non-efficient way of doing it..
Click to expand...
Remember that RAID is not the same as a backup all it provides is hardware redundancy which allows you to keep working in the event of a disk failure (RAID5 also gives better read rates and more capacity per volume). What you don't get is protection against accidental or malicious file deletion, file corruption, controller failure, fire, flood or theft. You still need a backup to protect against those.

I'm not saying RAID5 is pointless, that would be hypocritical. I use RAID5 at home simply because if I did lose a disk I don't want to spend the time required to restore all my backups in the event of a disk failing. So I have a level of protection but I still have everything backed up to at least one place and in most cases two.
 
Thanks for the reply, that makes sense.

I think my main threat is a disk failing rather than malicious deletion etc. although obviously file corruption is a risk. All the information on these disks isn't so important I couldn't do without it should I lose it but it would be very annoying hence why I'm trying to find a simple(ish) solution.

Can I ask where you back up to?
 
i just use dvd to back up, what ever inportance since i just use usb harddrives for storage, i think i have like 500 dvd disk with stuff backup, but its all organsed, so would not bother me if i had to restore them, 20 a day be done in know time, cheaper that buying more harddrives
 
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