Basic Raid-"Backup"-idea/ question

[Mainevent422]

Hi all,

Im sort of new to this raid technology.

I understand there are a few ways to do raid, 1 and 0

if i use 1, which i believe to be sort of like a 1 for 1 copy of a hard drive, could i get rid of my backup files?

...


Here is my idea. I use a 500 GB Hard drive for my operating system, and a 1 tb for storage-movies, games, music, pictures, stuff like that.

1.) My motherboard has onboard raid, and i have not yet got a chance to fiddle with it..... My idea is this: If i buy another 500GB drive, clone the drive, and set them up as a raid array 1 in my bios, would i clear the need for a backup drive?

2.) If so, when i set up the array Hard drive A and Hard drive B would it delete the OS and i would then have to reinstall windows?

3.) Then, if one drive crashed would i then cut the array, and boot from Hard Drive B?


Thanks everyone for your help and answers....

 

[Mainevent422]

Bump, still looking for some help people, even a simple answer would do

 

[kamel5547]

RAID is not backup, sure in a simple drive failure situation it is ok, but in others it is not. As an example if something were to happen 9virus for example) to cause the deletion of files the action would be immediately mirrored on the other drive. if you have imporatant files you should at a minimum use a backup media that is external to the PC (and ideally not stored in the same location as the PC).

 

[Mainevent422]

Whoops never thought of it the other way around.

So if one drive crashes the other will also crash....

 

[gtvr]

"Crash" generally refers to hardware failure. RAID 1 does guard against that type of failure, with redundancy. It doesn't guard against file deletion, power surge that fries both hard drives, theft, etc.

Best bet for backup is something that you can have not near your PC - either removable backup stored away from the computer (or offsite) or an online backup.