Hard drive died, help with a replacement (and RAID)?

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stasissword

Commendable
May 13, 2016
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Waking up to see my computer at the dreaded 'no boot device' message has always been my greatest fear, and now it's become a reality... I come to you in need of help o great minds

So I'm leaning towards buying three cheap HDDs and setting them up as a RAID5. I know only the basics of what RAID is. If one fails, I can just replace it, right? Is this a bad idea?

This going to be for my main computer, with the OS and games on it. I usually keep my computer on 24/7, and I'm tired of hard drives failing on me without a contingency plan. My past (stupid) method has been to just buy another HDD, but that makes it so I can't RMA the failed still-under-warranty drive without losing the data. I can't afford the expensive data recovery service (yet) so I've just kept the failed drives. Would using a RAID5 configuration solve this issue? What do I need to set up a RAID? Which HDD brands to steer clear from?

Thank you friends
 
Solution
kanewolf
As the boot drive RAID is a bad idea. Use an SSD and appropriate backups. Backups are the best contingency plan. Get good backup software like Acronis and use it daily. If your PC is on 24/7 then use the Windows scheduler to run backups in the middle of the night (or day if you are an all night gamer).
Use a USB3 disk and create both image backups for the system drive and folder backups for important data.
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kanewolf

kanewolf

Titan
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May 29, 2013
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As the boot drive RAID is a bad idea. Use an SSD and appropriate backups. Backups are the best contingency plan. Get good backup software like Acronis and use it daily. If your PC is on 24/7 then use the Windows scheduler to run backups in the middle of the night (or day if you are an all night gamer).
Use a USB3 disk and create both image backups for the system drive and folder backups for important data.
 
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Solution
S

stasissword

Commendable
May 13, 2016
2
0
1,510
Hey, thanks for the reply. Is it possible to have a separate drive for the sole purpose of booting up in Windows with, and then have a RAID setup with all my data/programs? And if so, would it be possible to make Windows look and act exactly the same, except everything automatically gets saved onto the RAID?

I'm not sure about using an SSD, though the speed would be nice. I don't have much money and I'm trying to get the most space I can. I heard SSDs have a lower amount of times that they can be written/read than HDDs before they go bad - is that true?
Are there any alternatives to using backups? I know they're probably the best option, but using backups would mean cutting my storage capacity to half, so I thought RAID5 wouldn't be as bad...
My options seem to be either to get a single quality drive (with the problems I mentioned in the OP that I want to avoid...), or get multiple cheap drives and have some sort of backup system. What do you think? I'm not sure I can afford an SSD + an okay HDD for backups, so I'm leaning towards getting two cheap HDDs and pretending I only have one in order to have backups.
Anyway, thanks again.
 
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kanewolf

kanewolf

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May 29, 2013
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Having a boot drive and a separate data drive is quite common with SSD based systems. I have a 120GB SSD and 1.5TB data disk. I am just not a fan of RAID for home users. It can break in too many different ways. Backups can protect from so many things besides a hardware failure on a disk.
 
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