RAID info

[firehawk_1]

Hi.

I am trying to figure out which seems best here. Data is of course valuable to me.

I was thinking about going RAID0 - faster performance however with some research, I seem to get the impression that whilst it is fast, there is an even greater risk of data being lost.
Sure, we can then add a couple of other drives to do some mirroring (but I have a budget to bare in mind!) But does question in terms of performance (striping and backup at the same time?)

I do however backup the entire system from time to time using acronis and putting the backup on a seperate drive.


what should I do here? Should I do what I do in terms of the backup and use RAID0?

What about if the RAID fails - how does one restore the RAID?

 

[Hawkeye22]

RAID is not a backup, so glad you are using acronis to make regular backups. Since you do have backups, you can use raid 0 for some performance. If you have built the acronis rescue disk, you can boot with it to see if it detects your raid properly. Acronis should detect most raids with no problem. You can backup a raid volume just like you would back up a single drive.

If you are concerned with data loss, you can run raid 5 with three disks. Your computer will still be able to runn with a single bad drive. Remember, raid is for redundancy - your computer will continue to run if a drive fails. It will not protect you from viruses or accidental deletions. This is why it is important to maintain backups.

 

[firehawk_1]

well of course! (I know that)
I know RAID isn't backup but what I meant was.... in the sense of having RAID 5 where its RAID0 (perf) and also a single disk backup?

 

[Hawkeye22]

Backing up a raid volume should be as fast or faster than backing up a single drive of equivalent size. Remember, you are reading/writing the same amount of data, only on a raid drive that data is being striped instead of going to a single drive. The only time you might see a performance hit is restoring a backup to a raid 1 (mirroring) since it now has to write the same data to two drives.

 

[firehawk_1]

Thanks. Sorry my mind is a little confused.

having a 3rd drive as a RAID is for what purpose? For backup of the RAID0 drive? IF so then how would I restore the backup from that drive to a new RAID0 drive?

 

[Hawkeye22]

It depends on the raid level. Raid 0 isn't a true raid since it doesn't support redundancy. If one drive fails, the entire array is dead and data will be hard to retrieve. Raid 5 requires three drives minimum. Along with striping data across the drives, it also stripes parity bits. These bits are necessary for the raid controller to rebuild a drive after one of the drives dies. that is if one drive fails, the computer can continue to run until the bad drive is replaced, at which point the raid controller uses the parity bits to rebuild the data on the new drive.

You can find the different raid levels here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

 

[firehawk_1]

thank-you!

what about the life/quality of the drive itself? I mean does RAID have an impact on the lasting of the drive?

 

[Hawkeye22]

No, raid has no impact on the life of a drive.