Raid 1

[edgefog]

I had recently had a problem w/ a raid failure and am attempting to recover data using Ubuntu 9.10. To avoid such a problem in the future I was thinking that if I create a raid 1 volume for just my operating system (xp 64). if I have a raid failure in the future can I disable the raid in the bios and boot just from the 1st and or 2nd HD in the array. Is this possible? I do have two more SATA connections available in my Intel Matrix Storage manager (Intel® ICH10R). I thinking this will allow me to keep a back up of my OS. I plan to have a 2nd array using raid 10. If I do this can I install programs to the raid 10 array so they will take advantage of the raid 0 to run faster?

 

[sub mesa]

RAIDs themselves fail while the disks being perfectly fine, especially on Windows.

If you want your data to be sure, focus on a *backup* instead. RAID1 is nice for servers; but home users would benefit much more from having a good backup instead; which takes just as much space.

It also means you do not have to use any RAID drivers and makes your storage setup simpler and less things that can go wrong. Besides the quality of onboard RAID drivers for Windows is quite low; Intel is the only 'mediocre' one. Normally onboard RAID0 or RAID1 is fine though; i just doubt its the most logical setup in your case.

Please understand that RAID is no backup; RAID is redundancy; i.e. a live copy. If you overwrite file X or have corrupted filesystem or a virus eats your files... RAID1 won't protect you against that.