RAID

jpod

jpod

jpod

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Hi

I keep a lot of stuff on my PC that I back up fortnightly I guess, I can't lose it, pics, documents etc.

Is 4 HDDs in Raid 10 safe?

My understanding is that I can remove and replace a HDD if one fails and carry on typing. I have a home office.

Is it easy to set up for a rookie like me? Plus a regular PC,2500k Gigabyte board.

Thanks pod
 
RAID is for high availability, it is not the same as having backups. RAID 10 will be two drives as RAID 0 (high speed, you will lose all data if one drive drops out or fails). The second two drives will be in the same format, but they will be a copy of the first two, so if one disk out of a pair fails, you still have the other pair. RAID 0 is for speed, and is not recommended if you want your data safe, which is why RAID 10 compensates by having a second pair of disks mirroring the first pair.

However, if your computer gets hit by lightning, or gets burgled, or your house burns, or you get hit by malware that encrypts your files, or if you accidentally delete your disk, all the RAID in the world won't help you. You need some kind of (preferably offline) regular backup if you absolutely cannot loose the data.

If your motherboard has the onboard RAID firmware from the Intel chipsets, it's easy to set up. The Intel RST software guides you through it, you just have to be careful to copy the right disk to your new drives.

You may find that your system gets slower, as it will have to send more data across the busses to keep all these drives updated, especially when writing. If you don't have a recent motherboard, you might notice this extra load on the system.

You're probably better off just using a couple of drives for RAID 1, and using the others in an external caddy, and setting RST to use it as a recovery drive that updates itself every ten or twenty minutes - kind of like constant backups.
 
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Raid 10 is one of higher resilient raids, but does mean you only get 50% of your total disk capacity (assuming all the drives are the same). It should cater for 1, potentially 2 (if they are in the same mirror set) disks failing.

Hot swapping (replacing a failed disk and the raid rebuilding automatically) is dependant on the raid card, and the nature of the disk failure. If you are using on board controllers then it may not support this - you would have to check the board specs.

Onboard controllers aren't the greatest for raid support - they tend to be a hardware/software hybrid. For the best raid protection and features you would ideally need a hardware raid controller card - but they are expensive.

If your docs are important then separate backups are ALWAYS a good idea - since raid alone will not cover things like files being overwritten/deleted unintentionally, file corruption, raid controller issues, virus attack, total system loss through something like power supply failure/power surge damage, or more severe accidental damage, theft etc.

To be extra certain, keep a backup copy at another location too. Unless your documents are extremely important, then doing regular backups to a couple of different disks is usually sufficient for home users.

It is at the end of the day though a risk management exercise, with some pretty extreme and expensive solutions available - depends on how much you value your data.

Hope that helps?
 
Hi - Hey thanks fellas, that does help and thank you both for such comprehensive advice. Food for though and I am going to have a google, thank you.
 
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