External HDD vs RAID 1

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football52

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So Im always paranoid about storage with computers and Im building a desktop and Im putting a good chunk of money into it. Would it be better to use RAID 1 or External HDD to restore my pc is something were to happen?

I was originally going to get a samsung 840 250gb ssd
Western digital 1 tb 7200 rpm hdd
 
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Martell1977


If you decide to do both, I'd suggest getting bigger than 1TB on the external. You'd be amazed how fast a 1TB can fill up. Especially if you are backing up things like movies and music.
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Martell1977

Martell1977

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They both have their ups and downs.

RAID 1 - Ups: All changes are saved to both HDD's with no need to set a schedule or run a program, HDD failure is solved by replacing the faulty HDD and the computer will automatically recreate the system mirror, no real loss of productivity while mirror is being created.
Downs - all changes are saved, if you accidentally delete a file, it will be deleted from both drives in the array. HDD's are internal and not portable.

External HDD - Ups: Can be used as offsite backup storage, if file gets accidentally deleted you can use the backup to restore it as of the last backup.
Downs: Need to run a program or schedule to run the backup or remember to do it manually, can be lost, stolen or damaged, upon HDD failure you would need to wait for the backup/image to restore new drive to usable levels.
 
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Martell1977

Martell1977

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If you decide to do both, I'd suggest getting bigger than 1TB on the external. You'd be amazed how fast a 1TB can fill up. Especially if you are backing up things like movies and music.
 
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football52

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I wont be storing movies on it, music maybe. I just play movies using the optical drive instead of downloading on the pc. It will be mostly for documents, applications and programs (im a prgrammer)
 
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It depends on how paranoid you are !

Personally I am pretty paranoid myself after losing some data back in the Windows 95 days. I don't bother with RAID anymore although I used it for years.

With SSD prices as low as they are today and the huge performance increase they offer I recommend an SSD of at least ~250GB for your C: drive to install Windows and your programs on. Then at least 1 traditional platter drive for storage and backups.

Then another external drive not in the case and not plugged in unless you are doing backups. A large thumb drive can work here as well and they are pretty cheap if you get them on sale. Keep backups of anything you can't replace on this like photos and any documents. This will prevent a lightning strike for zapping everything.

Then If you are super paranoid like I am get another thumb drive or even burn those same irreplaceable files to a DVD or CD and keep them somewhere other than your house. My uncle lives close to me and he happens to have a safe that is fireproof so I keep a copy there as well. Just things that I can't replace such as photos of people who have passed away or photos of the kids. You can also use a cloud based storage service for this stuff as well if you don't happen to have anywhere convenient like a close relative.

Redundancy like this may seem overboard but it will protect your data from pretty much any conceivable 'bad thing' that could happen including a house fire. Not something you want to think about but I'm a better safe than sorry kind of person. ;)
 
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football52

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Im the same way, i bought a new laptop not to long ago and had tons of half done homework and lengthy programs in progress (I have windows 8) and I upgraded to windows 8.1 and it removed all my documents. Luckly I recovered them but thats when I went out and bought a 1Tb external hdd for my laptop
 
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Always better safe than sorry. I've seen too many people lose too much stuff over the years. I even know a woman who lost all of her wedding and honeymoon pictures due to a dead laptop.
 
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Martell1977

Martell1977

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I had a client lose all her customer data when her computer died. I tried to get her to do backups, but she wouldn't always remember or want to bother. Now though, I have her setup with a small file server running RAID 1. Still working on getting her to setup a offsite backup, but at least for now, her data will be intact if a single HDD fails.
 
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football52

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My boss juat recently got a new pos system for work and got a new host computer and within 2 months the HDD malfunctioned and crashed. I dont believe he has raid but since his computer is hooked up to the registwr computer, they has him save everything to that computer as well. So when it crqshed they had to change the server host. It was just a big mess
 
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