Which Raid should I use

[chitranjan]

I am a video editor and have some family photos That I don't want to loose.

 

I don't want to keep a stack of portable drives, so looking for high speed with storage.

 

Thanks in advance

[EarthboundHero]

RAID1 or 5 I think. Could  be wrong.

[Laputacake]

Raid 1 for redundancy

[Enderman]

neither.

use one drive as a normal drive and a second drive for backing up the first drive once a day

[marat569]

If you can afford 3 HDDs, 5. Raid5 is usually the "golden raid" for redundancy (Raid 50 if you're super cool).

[fringie]

Raid 1 = mirror two drives = 2x redundancy. 2 drives minimum

Raid 5 = Mirror multiple drives over 2 (so u could do 5 for 5x (etc.) redundancy if you really wanted to). 3 drives minimum

Raid 10 = performance and redundancy. It does RAID 0 which splits 2 drives (or more) to give u 2x (or more depending on how many drives you do) speed then it does raid 1/5 depending on how you configure it. You require 4 or more drives to do raid 10 tho.

[NumLock21]

RAID 1 call Mirror protects from hardware failure not software, so if your system got infected with a virus or has a windows problem, both of these types of problems are written to both drives. The purpose of RAID 1 is, if 1 HDD dies and the other one still works, you can continue to use your computer, until the dead HDD is replaced and the RAID is rebuilt. Now if somehow the PSU fries both HDD, and both of them are dead, there is no RAID, that's capable of protecting that type of disaster.  Very important files? Backup to more than 1 drive, can't just rely on a single backup source.

[Captain_WD]

I am a video editor and have some family photos That I don't want to loose.

 

I don't want to keep a stack of portable drives, so looking for high speed with storage.

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

Hey chitranjan,

 

You have several options in front of you. How much drive failure tolerance are you looking for? How big of a speed boost would you like? How large should the storage be? How many drives are you willing to use?

 

As the guys mentioned, RAID1 offers good redundancy as you use one or more drives to create a identical copy of your primary drive. 

RAID5 and RAID6 provide both speed and redundancy where the first can sustain 1 drive failure while the second - 2. RAID5 uses the capacity equivalent of the size of one of the drives for redundancy, while RAID6 - the size of two drives. Speed depends on the number of drives used.

RAID10 is also an option, giving you good redundancy and speed boost but taking up 50% of the storage for redundancy. 

 

I would recommend using an external source for a backup, a different build, NAS or simply use a drive that is not connected to your primary build (internal or external). Redundancy is not the same as a backup.

 

Captain_WD.

[iain]

I would say raid 1. I personally use stable bits drive pool software on my server but that is something  different you could look at.