Just HOW fragile are Raid 1 and 0?

[Argus97]

I figured this was the best place to ask. I'm getting a new computer soon with 4 drives, 2 M.2's and 2 Sata SSD's. I was going to set the two M.2's to be the OS drive and have Raid 1 just do if something happens the important stuff will be safe. And I was going to set the two Sata SSD's to run in raid 0, not just for performance, but because I'm super OCD about file origination and I've got about 5TB's of files, and splitting them between two drives and not just having the whole folder tree is going to bother me. 

 

But EVERYTHING I read about Raid makes it seem like if you sneeze near a computer with it, or look at it funny it'll break. I was under the assumption that the ONLY thing that breaks a Raid was one of the drives breaking. That's the ONLY way to lose all of the data. But now I keep hearing about if the power is suddenly cut, or if the computer blue screens, ect, THAT breaks it too? The system won't have a battery for the raid controller, and the most I know about the controller from the manufacturer is it's a "Intel Raid Controller." But they said there is no internal battery for it. I assumed if the computer blue screened, or power was cut, it would just act like a normal drive, where if something was being written to it, maybe THAT file would be corrupt, but I keep hearing that the entire array and all of it's data will be lost? 

 

I'll definitely be backing up my computer, probably every other week. But at this point I don't know if Raid is even safe, it sounds like not just raid 0, but also raid 1 if the system blue screens will just break. I don't need Raid 0 for the speed, that's just a bonus. I want it so there are less drives in "My Computer" to go through, so it's just 1 drive with everything on it. Is there anything else that isn't as dangerous as Raid 0 to do to combine two drives? And Just HOW fragile are Raid 1 and 0?

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, Argus97 said:

it would just act like a normal drive, where if something was being written to it, maybe THAT file would be corrupt, but I keep hearing that the entire array and all of it's data will be lost?

It's not that it WILL corrupt, it's that it MAY corrupt. Two different things. Also, yes, if there is an active write going in, the RAID can get corrupted entirely, instead of just the file. That said, it's not nearly as fragile as you make it sound like, especially with SSDs, because SSDs write stuff down so fast that the chances of the drive losing power right in the middle of a write is quite tiny. Also worth noting is that while there aren't any writes going into a RAID, it also won't break. It's only writes that may break it, not reads.

[Argus97]

23 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

It's not that it WILL corrupt, it's that it MAY corrupt. Two different things. Also, yes, if there is an active write going in, the RAID can get corrupted entirely, instead of just the file. That said, it's not nearly as fragile as you make it sound like, especially with SSDs, because SSDs write stuff down so fast that the chances of the drive losing power right in the middle of a write is quite tiny. Also worth noting is that while there aren't any writes going into a RAID, it also won't break. It's only writes that may break it, not reads.

Okay, well would you suggest not having Raid 1 on the OS drive? It's not vital to me to have Raid on that one, and I'm assuming the OS drive does a lot more tiny writes randomly when using windows. Writing to Appdata, and general windows files and stuff.

[LIGISTX]

I mean... if you are that worried about backup, I wouldn't go RAID 1 on the m.2's, thats just a really expensive idea for "no real reason".

 

I would get a normal hard drive and use some backup software to replicate all important folders from your SSD's to that drive. That way you can back up both your m.2 and your SATA SSD's to it. Then for 5 bucks a month, backblaze offers unlimited online backup, so just go ham with that.

 

I have had a couple different RAID 0 setups over the years going back to my 300 GB Velociraptors and today with the 830 Pro's in my sig. I have never had an issue, but that doesn't mean "its a good idea". I keep none of my important data on my PC, I have a server/nas/homelab that it all resides on which is in RAID Z2 (software RAID 6) under freenas, and then all important data is backed up to another location AND backblaze.... As you can tell, I have lost data before and it sux. That was from other random issues, but actually never from a RAID issue lol.

 

That said, you can run RAID 0 on the sata SSD's, I would just back up any important data on them to another source as well. If one of the SSD's dies, everything on both is gone forever. I understand the folder tree issue, but I suppose its important to understand what this data is exactly. Does it NEED to be on SSD? If you have a lot of data, why not just use harddrives over SSD's, the price per GB is WAY cheaper, and no worry about what drive things are on, buy a 6 or 8, 10 or even 12 TB drive, have a partition of that back up your m.2, and use backblaze on all of it and call it a day.

 

But back to your questions, yes, power loss while writing can be an issue, but that can affect even non-RAIDed drives. Your most likely to just lose whatever was in transit at the time, not the entire array or anything. RAID is decently robust as its a pretty mature technology, but unless you actually NEED to use it, its not advised. Like I said, I have a RAID 0 SSD setup on my machine, but its literally just steam and origin games. If it got nuked tomorrow, about 6 hours later I would have re-downloaded all my games from steam anyways..... not a big deal. Nothing on there is production data, even my main m.2 is the same. If windows nuked itself, about 45 mins later I would be reformatted, get my main programs installed and be up and running. If it all really hit the shit, I have backblaze for full scale recovery.

[WereCatf]

2 minutes ago, Argus97 said:

Okay, well would you suggest not having Raid 1 on the OS drive? It's not vital to me to have Raid on that one, and I'm assuming the OS drive does a lot more tiny writes randomly when using windows. Writing to Appdata, and general windows files and stuff.

Meh, those are tiny random writes, I wouldn't worry about them. As for having RAID1 on the OS-drive.. well, I'd say it's a matter of taste. I have no issue with reinstalling Windows and my apps from scratch, if my drive goes bad, and it's a good excuse to clean up all the cruft, too, and all of my important files are automatically synced in real-time to my NAS/server, so there's always a copy on one of the machines, even if the other completely combusted and burned to the ground.

[TrigrH]

What motherboard do u have?

[it_dont_work]

1 hour ago, Argus97 said:

I want it so there are less drives in "My Computer" to go through, so it's just 1 drive with everything on it. Is there anything else that isn't as dangerous as Raid 0 to do to combine two drives? And Just HOW fragile are Raid 1 and 0?

Well then go for it. Might need to change your thinking a little though, Raid is for redundancy not backup purposes. ie: virus/ file corruption is on a raid1 array, data is lost/fucked

 

If you're backing up your data, either radio 0 or 1 are no more or less safe. Redundancy is not the same as backup. Given I also have a 6tb nas with my dvd/br collection and music library, its in raid1 since multiple users might be accessing it at once, if something compromised the data its all gone, as I don;t have a backup. if a drive dies I can rebuild the array that's less of an issue. 

[Argus97]

1 hour ago, LIGISTX said:

I mean... if you are that worried about backup, I wouldn't go RAID 1 on the m.2's, thats just a really expensive idea for "no real reason".

 

I would get a normal hard drive and use some backup software to replicate all important folders from your SSD's to that drive. That way you can back up both your m.2 and your SATA SSD's to it. Then for 5 bucks a month, backblaze offers unlimited online backup, so just go ham with that.

 

I have had a couple different RAID 0 setups over the years going back to my 300 GB Velociraptors and today with the 830 Pro's in my sig. I have never had an issue, but that doesn't mean "its a good idea". I keep none of my important data on my PC, I have a server/nas/homelab that it all resides on which is in RAID Z2 (software RAID 6) under freenas, and then all important data is backed up to another location AND backblaze.... As you can tell, I have lost data before and it sux. That was from other random issues, but actually never from a RAID issue lol.

 

That said, you can run RAID 0 on the sata SSD's, I would just back up any important data on them to another source as well. If one of the SSD's dies, everything on both is gone forever. I understand the folder tree issue, but I suppose its important to understand what this data is exactly. Does it NEED to be on SSD? If you have a lot of data, why not just use harddrives over SSD's, the price per GB is WAY cheaper, and no worry about what drive things are on, buy a 6 or 8, 10 or even 12 TB drive, have a partition of that back up your m.2, and use backblaze on all of it and call it a day.

 

But back to your questions, yes, power loss while writing can be an issue, but that can affect even non-RAIDed drives. Your most likely to just lose whatever was in transit at the time, not the entire array or anything. RAID is decently robust as its a pretty mature technology, but unless you actually NEED to use it, its not advised. Like I said, I have a RAID 0 SSD setup on my machine, but its literally just steam and origin games. If it got nuked tomorrow, about 6 hours later I would have re-downloaded all my games from steam anyways..... not a big deal. Nothing on there is production data, even my main m.2 is the same. If windows nuked itself, about 45 mins later I would be reformatted, get my main programs installed and be up and running. If it all really hit the shit, I have backblaze for full scale recovery.

I'm definitely interested in backblaze. More concerned about the privacy though, reading through their privacy section I'm not a huge fan of decrypting the data on their end to give to me. For backups, would you recommend just the built in windows backup tool? And does that do incremental backups/delta backups? Or would I have to go through the entirety of the drives every time I backup? 

 

1 hour ago, it_dont_work said:

Well then go for it. Might need to change your thinking a little though, Raid is for redundancy not backup purposes. ie: virus/ file corruption is on a raid1 array, data is lost/fucked

 

If you're backing up your data, either radio 0 or 1 are no more or less safe. Redundancy is not the same as backup. Given I also have a 6tb nas with my dvd/br collection and music library, its in raid1 since multiple users might be accessing it at once, if something compromised the data its all gone, as I don;t have a backup. if a drive dies I can rebuild the array that's less of an issue. 

Right, no I know Raid is for redundancy. I know if I delete a file on one part of a Raid 1 array, it's gone on the other. I'd treat it as just having 1 drive, and still backup to external drives. My big question comes back to, is it more volatile than a normal drive? Should I not be seeing it as a normal drive, for Raid 1 or 0. Like, is there a chance with a normal drive for a bluescreen or sudden cut of power to just corrupt the entire thing? And does that chance increase moderately with Raid? I want to use Raid 1 so in the case something happens to a drive, I don't need to go through the entire windows set up process again, set up all my stuff, ect. That's the reason I'd go with Raid 1, I know it isn't a backup. For Raid 0, yeah, I'll be storing important files on it. But if I have something like backblaze running, and if I backup every so often to an external hard drive, is that an okay circumstance to have important files on a Raid 0?

[LIGISTX]

8 hours ago, Argus97 said:

I'm definitely interested in backblaze. More concerned about the privacy though, reading through their privacy section I'm not a huge fan of decrypting the data on their end to give to me. For backups, would you recommend just the built in windows backup tool? And does that do incremental backups/delta backups? Or would I have to go through the entirety of the drives every time I backup? 

 

Right, no I know Raid is for redundancy. I know if I delete a file on one part of a Raid 1 array, it's gone on the other. I'd treat it as just having 1 drive, and still backup to external drives. My big question comes back to, is it more volatile than a normal drive? Should I not be seeing it as a normal drive, for Raid 1 or 0. Like, is there a chance with a normal drive for a bluescreen or sudden cut of power to just corrupt the entire thing? And does that chance increase moderately with Raid? I want to use Raid 1 so in the case something happens to a drive, I don't need to go through the entire windows set up process again, set up all my stuff, ect. That's the reason I'd go with Raid 1, I know it isn't a backup. For Raid 0, yeah, I'll be storing important files on it. But if I have something like backblaze running, and if I backup every so often to an external hard drive, is that an okay circumstance to have important files on a Raid 0?

Windows file history is a file by file backup, yes. It keeps history states and is actually pretty good. It has came in handy for me before. Also, backblaze has the option to set your own encryption passphrase, so I wouldn’t be worried about the security of it. Someone would need to break the encryption or find a backdoor to whatever encryption they are using to get at your data; it would be easier to exploit your windows computer the data originated from, lol.

 

RAID is not “more volatile” then no raid. Any system has its problems, and loosing power while writing data is always an issue. But this can be fixed with a battery backup, and even if you don’t do that, 99.9% of the time just the data being written at that moment will be corrupted, not the entire windows install. Obviously anything is possible, but I think there is also a level of worry and risk you just have to accept. There is always a chance something can go haywire and that is why real production environments don’t just have very redundant RAID arrays, they have mirrored servers at different physical locations.

 

It all comes down to how much is your time worth to you. On the off chance a drive dies, RAID 1 will save you. One drive can fail outright and you can continue using your computer. But now your paying a good bit more money just as a “what if” my drive takes a dump. It’s possible, drives die all the time. But is that worth it to you? Only you can decide.

 

You can also create weekly images of your boot drives to a normal hard drive and load that image if your boot drive dies. There are a lot of ways to try and protect your data, but it’s easy to go overboard as well. It comes down to how much you want to accept downtime, and how you value that downtime. If it’s “just annoying” most folks wouldn’t pay for redundant setups. Usually people start to worry about RAID 1 when they depending on their computer and data for their job/briskness and every hour it’s down you actively lose the ability to make money... like I said, it’s uo to you what level of downtime your willing to accept.