to RAID or not to RAID

[sterling42]

After a recent hard disk failure on one of our work computers, and almost a full day lost while getting it fixed, the tech guy has suggested that we purchase a new computer with three hard drives set up in a RAID 5 configuration. 

Our office has only two computers, networked together, used mostly for crunching numbers.  Ultimately, it is time to upgrade both of them anyway...but...

Is a RAID array really worth the extra money?  I have really only ever seen a hard drive fail once.  (And seriously, it seemed pretty easy to recover the data off of it even after it failed.)

I suspect he is out to make a sale, and I dont fault him for that, but I am left wondering if it really is worth it?

How many headaches are caused by the RAID array itself. as compared to failed hard drives?

Is there maintenance involved in working with a RAID array, or just set it up and forget it?

Are there other options?

 

Ideas and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks.

 

[sterling42]

4 minutes ago, Julian2000nl said:

It's worth it in my opinion. But you could also use hourly/daily backups to a cloud service.

That would be one of my points though.  If a back up is going to save all the data, What is the actual point of the RAID?

[Roawoao]

With just three hard drives running two slightly larger ones in RAID 1 is going to be much more "reliable" even if the RAID part screws up internally the two drives are actually just complete mirrors of each other and recovery is a joke. What I do is just have a boot SSD and a RAID 1 HDD array for data storage. You still want to have backups even with that. Penalty with RAID 1 is that you halve your storage with RAID 5 you need at least 3 drives and one drive effectively is used for redundancy spread across the array. 

 

 

[Roawoao]

5 minutes ago, sterling42 said:

That would be one of my points though.  If a back up is going to save all the data, What is the actual point of the RAID?

With raid you can have a hardware failure and not need to recover from backup so you can work uninterrupted although with RAID 5 it will operate in a degraded state which can be much slower as well as during rebuild it too will be much slower. RAID 1 being simple and dumb (halving the space) doesn't have a performance penalty in a degraded state and less so during a rebuild as it just has to copy the entire drive instead of calculating using the parity data.

 

I don't have workstations with RAID 5 in them as I use RAID 6 in large server arrays and RAID 1 inside my workstations. I prefer software raid 1 for workstation use because the controller card for RAID 5 can fail and this can be a single point of failure and is really annoying when it happens as you will need a spare controller on hand as well as the configuration.

[DXMember]

9 minutes ago, sterling42 said:

Is a RAID array really worth the extra money?  I have really only ever seen a hard drive fail once.  (And seriously, it seemed pretty easy to recover the data off of it even after it failed.)

but I am left wondering if it really is worth it?

was the lost day worth something like $80 for a 1TB hard drive?

yes the drives are pretty reliable nowadays but failures do occur and there are many different failures that can happen to a mechanical drive some are easier to recover data from than others but is it worth the risk of potentially losing all data or almost certainly having a lengthy downtime for the maintenance

maybe not a Raid 5, but you could definitely get a Raid 1 array out of two drives.

 

redundant storage is not a replacement for proper offsite backups

[DXMember]

5 minutes ago, sterling42 said:

That would be one of my points though.  If a back up is going to save all the data, What is the actual point of the RAID?

you don't get interrupted, you don't lose data that didn't have the chance to be backed up yet, your system keeps going with nothing but a little notification that you should replace the dead drive

[sterling42]

3 minutes ago, Roawoao said:

With just three hard drives running two slightly larger ones in RAID 1 is going to be much more "reliable" even if the RAID part screws up internally the two drives are actually just complete mirrors of each other and recovery is a joke. What I do is just have a boot SSD and a RAID 1 HDD array for data storage. You still want to have backups even with that. Penalty with RAID 1 is that you halve your storage with RAID 5 you need at least 3 drives and one drive effectively is used for redundancy spread across the array. 

 

 

Storage space really isn't that much of an issue.  Currently we have a 1TB drive which maybe is at about 25 % capacity.  No huge graphics files or media or anything like that. 

After reasearching it a bit, i'm inclined to the same...SSD for boot, and two HDD in a RAID 1 set up.

Still not completely sold on the RAID thing though...

 

[Roawoao]

7 minutes ago, sterling42 said:

Storage space really isn't that much of an issue.  Currently we have a 1TB drive which maybe is at about 25 % capacity.  No huge graphics files or media or anything like that. 

After reasearching it a bit, i'm inclined to the same...SSD for boot, and two HDD in a RAID 1 set up.

Still not completely sold on the RAID thing though...

 

RAID 1 is a simple form of RAID and if one hard drive dies you can keep on working full speed with no performance penalty (Zero recovery time, vs. a hours-day to restore from backup). And with your capacity requirement the drives are dirt cheap.

 

As others have said this doesn't replace the need to backup to the cloud/externally.

[sterling42]

8 minutes ago, DXMember said:

was the lost day worth something like $80 for a 1TB hard drive?

yes the drives are pretty reliable nowadays but failures do occur and there are many different failures that can happen to a mechanical drive some are easier to recover data from than others but is it worth the risk of potentially losing all data or almost certainly having a lengthy downtime for the maintenance

maybe not a Raid 5, but you could definitely get a Raid 1 array out of two drives.

 

redundant storage is not a replacement for proper offsite backups

This  makes much more sense to me, thank you.

So, if I were to build a system, booting to an SSD, and then having two HDDs in a RAID 1 array,,,(of course with proper backing up), there should be little downtime if a hardware failure does occur.

I think the "lost day" was more of an inconvenience as opposed to actual loss of cash.  I'd prefer not to have it happen again, but i dont know enough about RAIDs and networking to tell the tech guy that he's trying to sell me snake oil.

If I am going to go  with a RAID set up, should i get a RAID controller, search for a motherboard with one build in, or just go with software?

 

 

[Roawoao]

4 hours ago, sterling42 said:

This  makes much more sense to me, thank you.

So, if I were to build a system, booting to an SSD, and then having two HDDs in a RAID 1 array,,,(of course with proper backing up), there should be little downtime if a hardware failure does occur.

I think the "lost day" was more of an inconvenience as opposed to actual loss of cash.  I'd prefer not to have it happen again, but i dont know enough about RAIDs and networking to tell the tech guy that he's trying to sell me snake oil.

If I am going to go  with a RAID set up, should i get a RAID controller, search for a motherboard with one build in, or just go with software?

For raid 1 you can just go with built in motherboard raid or just software raid. (One downside to the windows software raid is that it won't really warn you if there is something wrong).