Raid setup for buisness PC and drive setup

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
B

Befoe

Commendable
Jan 21, 2017
6
0
1,510
Hi,
I recently started a small buisness and bought a PC dedicated to it. Most of the work it'll be doing is accounting and spreadsheet work so I went with a refurbished hp prebuilt desktop. It has mounts and ports for 2 more drives but comes with an SSD to boot off of. I'd like to have some redundancy for important files and am going to install 2 1TB HDDs in the system.

Here's my question. What drives should I use for my 2 drive RAID 1 array? Additionally, should I worry about a RAID card with only 2 drives or will a software solution work just fine for this?
I'm currently looking at getting WD Blacks or WD Reds. Both would be 1 TB. I've done a bit of research and some people have suggested the Reds because of their reliability. However, is there any downside to using a NAS drive in a system that won't be running constantly? Alternatively, is there any reason a Black drive wouldn't be the best for this setup?

Thanks for any help. Also if you have any tips for setting up RAID I'd appreciate it. I'm a little intimidated by the whole process.
 
Solution
Solandri
If

  • ■Your business will suffer and you will lose money due to downtime caused by a hard drive failure, then you want RAID (RAID 1 based on the description of your case - two hard drives mirroring each other). The point of RAID is to allow you to continue to access files on the RAID array even if a disk fails.
If

  • ■The computer is not essential to your business, and you can withstand a few hours or a day downtime while you replace the failed drive and restore from backups, then you don't need RAID. Just make sure you have good backups (backed up nightly, or even hourly depending on how often and how many files you create).
RAID is not a backup. its to keep data accessible in spite of a HDD failure. Even if you use RAID...
Sort by date Sort by votes
4745454b

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
Apr 29, 2006
29,241
437
93,590
I'm firmly in the no RAID camp. Do you know what RAID is? Why it is? What it really does? Hint, it's not something you need based on what you wrote. What you want are two 1TB drives, one of them in an external form such a USB or slot loading tray. As RGD1101 said, backup. Nightly. Do this to the external drive. Bring the external drive home with you every night/after every backup. If you do this you won't have any data loss worries.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solandri

Solandri

Illustrious
Jan 4, 2012
4,919
98
39,240
If

  • ■Your business will suffer and you will lose money due to downtime caused by a hard drive failure, then you want RAID (RAID 1 based on the description of your case - two hard drives mirroring each other). The point of RAID is to allow you to continue to access files on the RAID array even if a disk fails.
If

  • ■The computer is not essential to your business, and you can withstand a few hours or a day downtime while you replace the failed drive and restore from backups, then you don't need RAID. Just make sure you have good backups (backed up nightly, or even hourly depending on how often and how many files you create).
RAID is not a backup. its to keep data accessible in spite of a HDD failure. Even if you use RAID, you still need to make a backup of data on it.

For small operations like this, I recommend software RAID (a mirror in your case). Hardware RAID means you need to buy additional copies of the hardware and keep them in a closet as as spares. If you try to buy a replacement RAID controller after your original fails, you may find that it's no longer made or sold, or the only one available is exorbitantly priced by some shady 3rd party dealer with a 5 week ship time. With software RAID, you just transfer the drives to another computer and set up the software again.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12438/windows-10-storage-spaces
https://www.howtogeek.com/109380/how-to-use-windows-8s-storage-spaces-to-mirror-combine-drives/

Edit: The WD Red drives are pretty much the same thing as the WD Black drives, except they don't have TLER disabled. That's an obscure function which extends the time before a RAID controller or software decides a drive is unresponsive, and drops it from the array. WD is the only company which intentionally disables it. Any Seagate, Toshiba, or HGST drive has this capability built-in just like the WD Reds. So the Reds are an artificial product created by WD marketing by intentionally disabling a feature found on all other HDDs. That said, TLER is mostly relevant for RAID 5 arrays. It's not as important on RAID 1 because a rebuild there is just a straight copy, not a parity calculation. i.e. On RAID 5 if a 2nd drive fails during rebuild due to a TLER timeout, you lose all the data on the array. If that happens on RAID 1, you don't really lose anything because the files are still complete and intact, the drive just had trouble reading a file.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom