Solution to mass storage

Do you really need three RAID 1's? I'd leave the OS on RAID and sever the other two arrays. RAID is meant to prevent down time, not to be used as backups.

Well isn't RAID 1 basically the equivalent of a backup?

So how does one go about servering the other two?

I've been looking at rackmounts and they seem to be quite expensive but don't contain many hard-drive spaces.

What would you recommend?

What about an external SATA enclosure:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...


In case your controller does not support port multiplying

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

RAID 1 is a horrible option for backup

leave one drive on RAID 1 (the drive your OS is on) and take the other 2 out of RAID. Should give you a lot more room

i would suggest putting backups on an external drive that you only connect to make periodical backups

Well I want to keep a backup of EVERYTHING on the other 2 arrays (none OS) backed up, not periodically but instantaneously.

I only see RAID 1 as the solution. My connection is slow so requiring stuff takes a long time (external 1TB failure that got me into RAID 1 in the first place). That external SATA enclosure on Newegg also has PSU issues.

How does this sound?

Oldish computer which has 6xSATAII with 6 HD bays hooked into a gigabit LAN?


Any other ideas, rackmount?

RAID 1 is fault tolerence. That is if one drive dies, the system continues to run. However if you get a virus, you now have two infected drives as it is mirrored. A "real" backup makes recovery from a virus or two failed drives easy.

To sever the RAID, go into the RAID BIOS and tell it to remove the drives from the array.

Why do you need instantaneous backups? Buy Acronis TrueImage Home or some other backup software and just schedule it for nightly incremental backups.

Will this harm either drive (data loss) or will it just mean they won't mirror anymore?

Virus issue is a good point. I'll also look into the back-up software as well.

A RAID system used as a main drive is not a replacement for backing up data. In parity configurations it will provide the backup-like feature to protect from catastrophic data loss caused by physical damage or errors on a single drive. Many other features of backup systems cannot be provided by RAID arrays alone. The most notable is the ability to restore an earlier version of data, which is needed to protect against software errors causing unwanted data to be written to the disk, and to recover from user error or malicious deletion. RAID can also be overwhelmed by catastrophic failure that exceeds its recovery capacity and, of course, the entire array is at risk of physical damage by fire, natural disaster, or human forces. RAID is also vulnerable to controller failure since it is not always possible to migrate a RAID to a new controller without data loss

This depends on the RAID controller, but usually for a RAID 1 array you'll just end up with two drives with duplicate data on them. For safety reasons, a backup of the array before severing the drives would be useful.

Unless anyone else has a good point to counter this I think I'll...

-Have two external NAS's (using two oldish computers) one to backup the other using backup software and if the main PC gets a virus it will be ok (touch wood).

-Have RAID 1 on the main computer for the OS.


Thanks for replies guys!