Have 2 1 TB HDDs should i set up raid

[dan2222]

I dont know exactly what raid is, but i have two 1 Tb Hard drives and only have one half full. I cant afford a ssd just yet and was wondering if i would benefit from some type of raid set up. Wouldappreciate any suggestions, Cheers.

 

[inzone]

You can set up a raid 0 , but in doing so you will loose all the data that you now have on the one hdd unless you put the data you want to save on a cd/dvd or usb stick. You will get a speed improvement over seperate drives.

 

[ncc74656]

You can setup a Raid-0, in doing this you garentee data loss if a drive fails. Raid0 strips all your data across the 2 drives, half your data is on one and half is on teh other. doing this doubles your transfer speeds. however if one drive fails, all your data is lost.

you can setup Raid-1, in doing this 1 drive will be an exact copy of the second. read speeds will be faster but write speeds will be the same. doing this will give you only 1 TB of storage space as one drive is used as a backup for the other. this is the most secure version of raid you could do.

there are other versions of raid but not with only 2 drives. i suppose you could do jbod but all that does is make 2 or more drives look like 1 drive with no performance increase or security.

For you it may be best to just keep the drives separate and not do raid. if you are ok with loosing data or have backups then setup raid 0 and get more performance. if you are worried about loosing data and not about total storage space then setup raid 1.

 

[dan2222]

Well i have got a 1tb external hard drive, but to be honest im not even sure about doing back ups properly. I do set my system to back up, but the back up always gets full up and says not enough room to back up. I want to set it so it just backs up any new stuff if that makes sense.

As for the raid thing do you think i would be better to not complicate things and save for a ssd?

 

[ncc74656]

well... you can save for an ssd if you want more performance but SSD's are small and expensive. a good 220GB SSD is 400-500 bucks. it all depends on how much space you need really. smaller SSD's on the low end are more like 150-250.

as for backups, if you set a backup software that's built into windows it will often make duplicates. I recommend doing a manual backup of new files you make and a one time os image upon initial installation of windows.

 

[dan2222]

Ok i was just thinking a small ssd for os and couple of programmes.

And can i put a os image on a disk and how do i say manually back up photos and videos and documents, cause thats all i really care about.

 

[ncc74656]

you can put a OS image on anything you want thats large enough. a HDD, jump drive, camera XD/SD card, DVD, Blueray disk. you can use the built in windows image maker but that makes a folder with many files and a non compressed VHD. this means a 90GB HD will take 90GB to back up. if you use norton ghost or achronis true image then a 90GB HD might only take 50-70GB to back up.

as for backup on documents you simply drag and drop them into folders on an external HD. just like you would move files to a jump drive or MP3's to a mp3 player.

 

[dan2222]

Ok, so with ghost or something you only really save a little space. so do u think for me it would be best to use one drive and use the other as a back up in case main drive breaks and use the external as back up to incase i get burgled or something happens to my pc, i can hide the external.

 

[ncc74656]

raid 1 is used to backup a single drive incase of failure. using that with an external drive for secondary backup is good.

the down side to this is that you can only ever use 1 drive of space, where as if you keep the 2 drives separate and backup to the second drive then you can also save other things on this second drive with out having them on the first drive as well.

 

[dan2222]

Sorry to sound dumb but the last bit confused me. So i could use the two drives as separate, back up very important stuff like pics and vids to external and use the two drives togther.

 

[ncc74656]

you would have a C and D drive, C would have OS and files and D would have backups of the OS and other critical files. the main thing here with this setup is that if drive C being your OS gets a virus or crashes you can format it and reinstall with out loosing D. both drives could still have a mechanical failure but drive C is more common to require formats where as D is not. putting critical data on both C or D and external increases the chances of you keeping said data in a mission critical failure.

 

[dan2222]

Ok cool im gonna try that and see how i go. The other day i was trying to keep hdds tidy and was deleting stuff that i had twice and ended up delting 5 years of music colloction. So im gona take my time with this lol.

 

[ncc74656]

you can recover that music easily if it was done not to long ago

 

[dan2222]

I did find a programe to revover it but instaed of recovering albums, it just revovered thousands of single songs, did i do it wrong or is there a better programe for doing it. I wouuld like it all back

 

[ncc74656]

nope, you will get single songs. that said you should be able to see the folders they were in which should be the albums. what program did you use? i use linux photorec or get data back for ntfs.

if you need help with the recovery let me know. if you download team viewer and PM me your logon info/password i can remote in and do teh recovery for you.

 

[tiotaitch56]

Sorry to be blunt, but It really does not seem like you should even be considering an SSD. The amount of "work" it would take to properly set-up and maintain an ssd or even a raid array may (with all due respect) be a little beyond your abilities at this point. I would recommend doing as others have mentioned and just get keeping every thing properly backed up at this point. Raid arrays, of any kind, can be fickle and problematic even with seasoned pro's setting them up !! SSD's open up a whole new can of worms !! Get back ups under your belt and do some research - give it time and get a little more adept with your computer abilities. Before too long, things will come easier! Not to mention that with time SSD prices should become more reasonable and the myriad of different problems with them will get worked out.

 

[dan2222]

Ok i will take both your advice and just keep learning untill i understand the basics a bit better. Its funny cause i built my computer but know very little about some really basic stuf lol.

And i will try and get music back but if i struggle i would appreciate your help, so will let you know.

 

[ncc74656]

building a comp is like playing with blocks as a kid. everything will only fit in one way and in one slot. a monkey could do it. the only bit of luck you need is to not ESD anything and be lucky enough to get parts that work together with out needing to tinker. os installs are guided now days so its not hard to install one once the hardware works.

SSD's dont open many more maintenance issues unless they are going into a raid, then you open up quite a bit of this but not that and that but not this unless that (stuff). if you are going to run a single SSD then trim will handle most everything you need so long as you dont get a crappy SSD. i have had very poor experience with OCZ's failing or dropping power, randomly not being detected or loosing file systems all together. I have 3 intel drives that have been running 2 years now with absolutely zero issues. the only issue i ran into with them was a cable issue where the plastic on the sata cable cracked and the cable came out of the drive. Me being stupid at the time decided i must have a raid issue so i rebuilt the array before seeing only 1 drive was missing. had to do a data recovery on a raid-0 array after that.

anyway, single SSD's are fine but expensive. considering you are running low on space and not totally sure how to do backups or move things between drives you may want to play with that before getting one as that would be required with a SSD. I could not live with a C drive below 200GB so i had to get 3 80GB SSD's you may be able to live with a 120 but i honestly would not suggest getting anything smaller than a 120 unless you just surf the web.

I have been setting up raid 0, 0+1, 5,6,10's for many years and only encountered a raid issue once with a raid 5 and i blame the intel controller for that one. for the most part a properly setup raid can run trouble free until a drive dies. but when a raid fails it does take someone who knows what they are doing to repair it or recover data.

 

[dan2222]

ok it all sounds like a unecesseary headache for me as i dont really need any complicated stuff, as you said i will keep playing about and learning. I just surf web, play games and am trying to turn this rig into my main source of music output, and i do a little video editing, so nothing really technical.

I just downlaoded recuva and its found thousands of music files so im restoring now so will see if there is some order to them. It seems as though many songs are found up to five times and this is annoying as i cannot bare to go through one by one and uncheck thousands of songs.

 

[ncc74656]

you will need to. welcome to the life of data recovery. try finding a clients txt files... do a quick search on your comp for all .txt and multiply that by 4 or 5.

I have some tools that does a very very good job of only sorting out the files that are most likely to work and only gives them to you once. the more you use your comp tho the harder it gets to recover anything functional. also dont recover the files to the HD you are recovering from... that will make things alot worse.