Raid 5

[MouthBoy]

I have had some concern lately with loosing my data on my PC. I have always kept a clean system but that doesnt mean that my HDD wont suddenly die on me. I am not bothered about my games or my windows install, and they are recoverable quickly but I am concerned about my personal data and my uni work.

Currently I have a 500gb F3 for boot and games. I have a 1Tb drive for my data, and that is backed up (when I remember to manually backup) to 2 x 1Tb WD Mybooks. However, I want to setup a method where I wont have to worry "I havent backed up in the last 30minutes".

Would replacing my current 1Tb drive with 3 1Tb F3s in Raid5 be a solution? If I correct, I would have 2Tb of storage with a 1Tb parity just in case of a drive failure. This would suit me but is it worth it? I would be using my onboard raid controller to do this too, so will that cause issues? I am not a major business here so I am not willing to shed out cash on a raid card and things, but I can afford a few drives to work with..

Thoughts?

 

[MouthBoy]

Raid is not a backup.

Raid is for high availabilty, performance, and redundancy. All valid goals, but it still doesn't make it a backup solution.

Sorry, I didnt explain very well. Its not going to be a "backup" as such. Its just "insurance" to know if I am working on something and something bad happens, I dont have to panic. I will still backup as much as I can to my externals.

 

[MouthBoy]

You might find it easier to do a raid1, as (as far as I know), Windows' support for Software RAID-5 is rather pants.

If you've a linux box, just head to a prompt and type man mdadm and get cracking

It would be hardware raid 5 on my motherboard, not windows raid 5.

 

[MouthBoy]

Why would you go for 3 1TB drives, rather than 2 2TB drives, still have the same capacity, but less drives required? How many users are you serving?

Well obviously the 3 drives as raid5 has a minimum requirement of 3 drives, 2 active and 1 parity.

Why don't you just run a rsync/cron job to do a delta change sync every minute.

Explain more? I never heard of rsync? If thats to backup to my WD Drive every minute its not going to be a good solution. If I am working on huge files that can span gigs and gigs, to have to send that information via USB every minute would be slow and annoying.

 

[MouthBoy]

So, with that said, it seems that a raid1 would be better for me. Maybe 2 x 1Tb drives? Do they have to match compleletly? Or can it be my current 1Tb with a newer 1Tb?

 

[MouthBoy]

If you use two different size drives, the smaller of the two will dictate the size. Any "wasted" bytes at the end of the larger drive are typically unavailable.

Thats cool then, so if I ordered an F3 1Tb drive, I would be able to Raid1 it with my current 1Tb drive? If so I shall look into doing this.