Offcourse I have been dealing with computers since the beginning of the Quake years and performance was always first before pleasure...Screw up? Obviously yes.
But let me ask you how pointless mirror RAID is. You take the time and money to buy another hard drive expecting something big and more room, which means...yes more movies games and no more concern for not having enough space on the hard drive.

Raid 0 enables more performance for people like me it's worth the risk of data loss. but what about Raid 1?Performance increase....no, Space increase....no, Anticipation for something new...no and worth the money...again no.

If your planning on usuing Raid 1 as a backup option please strike that off immediately. Think about it, it's called MIRROR...so for example if you fell down the stairs broke your arm and legs and looked in the mirror you would have a back up of yourself in perfect condition ( lol perfect condition yea right) THE ANSWER IS NO!!!!!

You'll see yourself damage and your gonna cry. Same thing goes with RAID 0 if you get a virus on 1 hard drive, you get 1 on the other. If you get a corrupt Windows file you get it on the other hard drive.

Nice backup? I thought so.

The only thing it would EVER and I mea EVER be good for is incase 1 hard drive fails. Thats it. But are you paying an extra sum of money just to wait for a day where your hard drive just fails? Or are you gonna live it up and either get more space or some more performance


Sorry just had to vent real quick
Hopefully ppl agree with me !

Yes, that is what RAID 1 is for. If you want to backup files for storage you should:

Get an external drive and store it away
Get an internal drive and store it away
Burn your data to DVD/HDDVD/BR and store it away
Tape drives
There are also online backup solutions these days
floppy disks!

I dont think anyone ever claimed that RAID1 was good for permant backups.

Trust me I've seen it alot...ppl suggest Raid 1 for Backup purposes. I just wanted to clear the air. lol

I beg to differ here.. I dont think RAID 1 should be considered as a replacement for taking backups.. RAID 1 is used for high availability.. even with RAID 1 you still have to take regular backups to counter condition of virus attacks, data corruption etc.

RAID 1 handles only one thing and that is High Availability in case of HDD failure.. So if you have a failure in one harddisk the second one (mirror) takes over and work continues till you can plan a down time to replace the faulty disk.

So lets not confuse the the purpose of RAID 1. I agree with L1qu1d in that RAID 1 being used as a backup solution is a waste of money.

The problem is not with RAID 1 - it is with the expectations of the person

RAID 1 has it's place and purpose - as everyone stated, it is NOT for performance or for space. It is for high availability (as atreyu stated).

I use RAID 1 - to minimize the possibility of my machine being down when I need it.
* If my HDD crashes and I have to restore my data from backups and install all the necessary apps that I need and the updates that I need, it will take me at least a few hours and that is not something that I can usually afford when I am in the middle of my work.
* Even if I restore from a Ghost backup, it could take me an hour or two - again, not something that I can usually afford when I am in the middle of my work.
* Besides, in either of these solutions, all work that I've done since my last backup is gone!

This is why I use RAID 1. That is what I expect from it and RAID 1 serves the purpose!
Is it possbile that both my drives get fried at the same time? Sure it is possible! But as I stated, my expectations are to minimize (not eliminate) the possibility of my machine being down

Just thought I'd share my thoughts about this

I agree with jj14 & atreyu.
It's not pointless in the datacenter enviroment. We use cold/standby mirror for our system disk drives for OS & application patching. That saves us hours, days of work for patch roll back.

I remember when we were putting a SAN in at work a number of years ago, one of the managers kept going on about how it was going to save backup costs because the SAN was redundant 8 ways to Sunday.

He just could not get the concept, despite how many people told him, that backups were not just for hardware failure.

I would pay that much money to have a backup harddrive incase of harddrive failiure lol

Hmm... I don't see how you save $$$.
In a corporate world, if a system goes down, it will costs a company thousands of dollars per hour. How much does it costs for an additional 36GB SCSI hard drive? How much does it costs for users couldn't access to the system application? How often an application won't starts up after application upgrade or a security patch, etc... It's price less compares to a the costs for an additional SCSI disk drive. Let not talk about the yelling/screaming from the management. RAID 1 has the capability that RAID 0&5 could not provide. Raid1 provides an instant patch roll back, it's close to transparent to the end users, more productive. It's not LOL when a system goes down and the employer still paying hundreds of employees sitting in their office being unproductive.

RAID 1 is for Redundancy, not Backup.

As stated for instance, if you get a virus on a RAID 1 array, bingo! you have the virus on both drives.

Many times people see the term "redundancy" and relate it as a form of backup, which it is not!

It simply means that if a drive physically dies, the system stays up until you can replace the bad drive.

One of the ways to get around this is to actually take the RAID 1 array and partition it into two (primary and backup). Install everything you need onto the primary and then, install Ghost on the primary and specify the backup destination to be the backup partition.
The advantage is that now, you are better protected against hardware problem (single drive failure) and software issues (virus, malware, corrupted install, accidental deletion of files). If one of your drives fail, just replace it (your system works in the meanwhile). If your system gets infected with a virus and you are not able to get it out, just restore the most recent Ghost backup from your 'backup' partition onto your 'primary' partition and you are good to go! If you accidentally deleted some file which you need, just go into the Ghost explorer and restore the file you need!

Do note that this is NOT a substitute for regular (daily) backups onto external storage (in case both drives fail or your RAID controller goes south)
HTH

I was talking about this at a personal level....wow such hard emotion dude....I'm just saying for the most part I would rather have space and performance then to wait and get my money's worth when my Hard drive fails....let me rephrase that IF my hard drive fails.

I'd say it would be more designed for a business machine, rather then a home user, but still could be used. If it needs to be up 24/7, that would be the best way to go, business wise. Other then that, for a regular home user... naaaah.

Apparently you don't understand what RAID is used for then. If you do, then you should state it in your 1st post. Good to let n00bs know what to expect though! They can always use the help

[quotemsg=1756141,10,65686]RAID 1 is for Redundancy, not Backup.

As stated for instance, if you get a virus on a RAID 1 array, bingo! you have the virus on both drives.
quotemsg]

A good hardware RAID1 provides an active or passive sync. More often the passive mirror sync will prevent and decrease the virus infection attack again.

"Performance increase....no"

ON the contrary! Depending on the controller, you can have a nice read performance increase. Both disks have the same information on it, so a good controller would use both disks to read. Write speeds would still be single-disk speed.

Who are you talking to right now??? If its me yes I dont know RAID all the well but I know thats pointless for me to spend money on a product that may or may not get used. I'd raid Raid 0 for performance or use the drives seperatly rather than RAID 1

The only thing I might consider using Mirror RAID would be RAID 0+1 and Have 4 Hard drives but even for that I'm iffy.

If one is really clever ...

Set up a Raid 1 placing the drives in hot swap bays.

Now you can do a backup simply by swapping out the "mirror" from the hot swap bays and letting the RAID rebuild.

Recovering the system is as simple as removing both drives and swapping in one of the good backups, swapping in a "mirror" to be rebuilt.

A bit more expensive than the solutions I use, but perhaps suitable for some.

I've been talking about the real uses for RAID for quite awhile now. RAID1 is not a backup solution. This is the easier one for people to understand. I also "preach" about why most people don't need AID0. People still think AID0 pays off for gaming, which is mostly CPU and GPU bound. I've seen people buy two harddrives and a soundcard while at the same time buying a midrange CPU and videocard. I'd tell them to drop the SC and second harddrive to they could move from the 7600GT to the 7950/x1950xt, but they keep telling me its about load time and sound quality. Me, I'd rather have the increased frame rate and resolution.

Welcome to the club. Keep talking about the real uses for RAID1, perhaps someday we won't be viewed as the weirdos.

Personally I think it is also a good idea to have redundancy for a system with RAID 1, because you can still have your computer working even for 1 HDD failure. You just don't have to IMMEDIATELY go for a DHL of a HDD and manually do a system restore after a HDD disaster. With RAID 1, what you do is just wait for the DHL of the new HDD, plug the new drive in, and the RAID controller does the new r