Building a new personal system - Can I use RAID 1?

[staatsof]

After a long time since the last system I'm starting over with a new system build.

I'm currently using Windows 2000 Professional and I may stay with that or go to XP. I'm not crazy about the installation restrictions of XP.

I'm thinking of implementing a simple 2 disk (80gb each) Raid 1 setup but I'm wondering if that's even possible unless the system disk is not a part of the raid system?

I'm also concerned about making recovery (non disk crashes) more complex than it already is.

I had a complete hard drive failure 2 years ago and paid $1500 to get the data back which I did. Never again!

I currently have two partitions on a single drive with all of my data and apps on the second partition. I guess I could have a third drive just for the op sys and do a RAID 1 with the others.

From what I can gather so far this would mean that these drives would be spinning 24/7/365. That's noisey and draws a lot of power.

Can someone suggest another solution along the following lines:

I could live with a days lost data. So if I could get an automated drive to drive copy periodically and an automated "changed" data backup daily.

I'd also be willing to have a seperate op sys disk if necessary.


Ideas ???????

Thanks Bob S.

 

[RichPLS]

RAID 1 is secure, if a drive fails, you have a spare.
No much performance increase in reads, but writes take a small hit.
You do not need to run it 24/7, unless you require that access.
I am installing 4 SATA drives, two for RAID0 boot drive, two for RAID1 data files.

 

[staatsof]

Bump

 

[riser]

I'd go with 3 hard drives and run a Raid-5.. it's fast in reading/writing and has the highest fault tolerance.

If you use a hardware setup, you should be able to span your OS across the 3 drives. But you might want to just pull off 2GB and put your OS there, Raid 5 the remaining. All together you'll lose 6GB plus the size of 1 HD for parity.

But if you run 2 disks, do the mirroring. It's simple to setup and if one drives fails, just break the mirror, pop your backup in, and rebuild the mirror with a new hard drive when you can.

But you definately want to run a hardware raid.


The hard drives will always spin.. even when not in use.. so with a mirror, if you write something to your drive, it'll write it to the 2nd drive also. It won't be a problem for what you're trying to do and I would definately recommend either Raid 1 or Raid 5.