Drives for Raid 1???

[SimpleRyke]

My hard drive just broke so i was thinking of buying a new one and putting it in raid 1 so that i wont loose any more files. Which drives should i buy? Lower teir ones or maybe just ditch raid and go for wd black .. Any suggestion on what should i do ? the goal is to preserve the data as long as possible... (  i dont turn off my computer by the way and its stays on 5/7 days a week, but the drives shouldnt be running when my pc is at idle)

 

[blu4]

WD Reds are for that sort of scenario. Although, you should look into a cloud backup solution for small files?

[ELSknutson]

WD Reds are tipicly used for this situation though I use these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5AD3CV9848&cm_re=hitachi_2tb-_-9SIA5AD3CV9848-_-Product  because they cost 1/3 the price of a WD black and 1/2 of a WD red and there made for server applications and they are historically decent drives. But is one were to fail you could just grab another one for cheap ware as a WD black you would be dropping another $120-$130 bucks if it died.  

[LiMz]

8 minutes ago, knox said:

My hard drive just broke so i was thinking of buying a new one and putting it in raid 1 so that i wont loose any more files. Which drives should i buy? Lower teir ones or maybe just ditch raid and go for wd black .. Any suggestion on what should i do ? the goal is to preserve the data as long as possible... (  i dont turn off my computer by the way and its stays on 5/7 days a week, but the drives shouldnt be running when my pc is at idle)

 

RAID 1/5/6/10 can be used for added redundancy. Do not confuse this with a good backup solution though.

 

A good backup solution after your redundancy is 2 backups.

One on-site and one off-site.

 

Grab a little USB external device and use that for your on-site backup.

And think of a cloud service for off-site backup.

 

In terms of your drives, maybe go WD RED as it's made for NAS usage and 24/7 scenario like your use case.

They are a little more expensive but have vibration protection and will last a little longer than greens/blues/blacks

[never_here]

WD reds are good for RAIDS.  Made for it, as said before.  However, i highly suggest cloud backups.  If your most critical files exceed 10GB, you should pay for the cloud back up services.  They are pretty much worth it.  You can get like crashplan which is $5-6 a month.  As long as you dont have TB's worth of data to back up, you should be fine.  Other good thing about crashplan is that you can also backup your critical files to an external driving using their program, so, you can technically make a local, and cloud backup with their one program.  Which also means, with local backup, you can restore/recover files much faster.

 

RAIDS are mostly needed if you need your files immediately at any time, and cannot afford any downtime.  Its expensive initially, and without a remote/cloud backup, you're still a bit vulnerable to data loss.  Figure out your needs and budget, and perhaps see which one you think suits you best.  But cloud backups are usually the best method to go now.

[SimpleRyke]

1 hour ago, LiMz said:

RAID 1/5/6/10 can be used for added redundancy. Do not confuse this with a good backup solution though.

 

A good backup solution after your redundancy is 2 backups.

One on-site and one off-site.

 

Grab a little USB external device and use that for your on-site backup.

And think of a cloud service for off-site backup.

 

In terms of your drives, maybe go WD RED as it's made for NAS usage and 24/7 scenario like your use case.

They are a little more expensive but have vibration protection and will last a little longer than greens/blues/blacks

im sorry i mislead you its not for backup, i just dont want the drive to fail unexpectedly, thanks though  wd red seems to be the best choice

 

[SimpleRyke]

1 hour ago, ELSknutson said:

WD Reds are tipicly used for this situation though I use these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5AD3CV9848&cm_re=hitachi_2tb-_-9SIA5AD3CV9848-_-Product  because they cost 1/3 the price of a WD black and 1/2 of a WD red and there made for server applications and they are historically decent drives. But is one were to fail you could just grab another one for cheap ware as a WD black you would be dropping another $120-$130 bucks if it died.  

i try to look for that drive in my place thanks !
 

[SimpleRyke]

1 hour ago, blu4 said:

WD Reds are for that sort of scenario. Although, you should look into a cloud backup solution for small files?

yes i do have a cloud for the small files  .. thanks

 

[SimpleRyke]

1 hour ago, never_here said:

WD reds are good for RAIDS.  Made for it, as said before.  However, i highly suggest cloud backups.  If your most critical files exceed 10GB, you should pay for the cloud back up services.  They are pretty much worth it.  You can get like crashplan which is $5-6 a month.  As long as you dont have TB's worth of data to back up, you should be fine.  Other good thing about crashplan is that you can also backup your critical files to an external driving using their program, so, you can technically make a local, and cloud backup with their one program.  Which also means, with local backup, you can restore/recover files much faster.

 

RAIDS are mostly needed if you need your files immediately at any time, and cannot afford any downtime.  Its expensive initially, and without a remote/cloud backup, you're still a bit vulnerable to data loss.  Figure out your needs and budget, and perhaps see which one you think suits you best.  But cloud backups are usually the best method to go now.

half of whats on my drive are for archival storage, but yes i have cloud buckup for the other files...  its just that i sometimes need to acces my archive ( yes its a few TB ) ,thats why i thought RAID might be the solution. Thanks  wd reds seems to be favoured

 

 

[Captain_WD]

19 hours ago, knox said:

~snip~

Hey knox

 

As the guys suggested, do not mistake the redundancy that a RAID array provides with an actual backup of your data. RAID doesn't offer safety against controller failure, user mistakes, data corruption or deletion or against power failure. If you want to have your data safe I would recommend replacing the failed drive with a new one and consider a backup solution (either an external drive or a NAS) for your important data as well as frequent backups.

On the topic, WD Red drives are indeed designed for this purpose and should give you great performance and reliability for a RAID1 array, as @blu4 suggested.

 

Another thing that you should seriously take into account is the RAID type, if you decide to go on that road. Things like level of redundancy, overhead, rebuild type, data availability and real read/write speeds as well as software vs hardware RAID do matter if you are doing important things on that array. 

 

Post back if you need more info! 

 

Captain_WD.

[SimpleRyke]

On 5/4/2016 at 5:11 PM, Captain_WD said:

Hey knox

 

As the guys suggested, do not mistake the redundancy that a RAID array provides with an actual backup of your data. RAID doesn't offer safety against controller failure, user mistakes, data corruption or deletion or against power failure. If you want to have your data safe I would recommend replacing the failed drive with a new one and consider a backup solution (either an external drive or a NAS) for your important data as well as frequent backups.

On the topic, WD Red drives are indeed designed for this purpose and should give you great performance and reliability for a RAID1 array, as @blu4 suggested.

 

Another thing that you should seriously take into account is the RAID type, if you decide to go on that road. Things like level of redundancy, overhead, rebuild type, data availability and real read/write speeds as well as software vs hardware RAID do matter if you are doing important things on that array. 

 

Post back if you need more info! 

 

Captain_WD.

yes , i plan on going to that direction. and yes i know that it is not a substitute to backup.  i dont have too many drives yet, so raid 1 probably my best option .( I have and ssd for speed stuff). I would really appreciate if you can give me your advice.  what do you mean by overhead, and rebuild type? also software , firmware or hardware  raid?. do i need to buy a raid controller? or should i settle for my motherboard to do the raid? Thank you in advance

 

my place have power outages, although its rare ( but its not 0 ) and the ups i have does not shutdown the computer ( if in the case there are no people around to turn off the computer)... so is my only option replace my UPS? because i read that it could fail the drive.

[scottyseng]

17 hours ago, knox said:

yes , i plan on going to that direction. and yes i know that it is not a substitute to backup.  i dont have too many drives yet, so raid 1 probably my best option .( I have and ssd for speed stuff). I would really appreciate if you can give me your advice.  what do you mean by overhead, and rebuild type? also software , firmware or hardware  raid?. do i need to buy a raid controller? or should i settle for my motherboard to do the raid? Thank you in advance

 

my place have power outages, although its rare ( but its not 0 ) and the ups i have does not shutdown the computer ( if in the case there are no people around to turn off the computer)... so is my only option replace my UPS? because i read that it could fail the drive.

I also recommend the WD Reds. They're really fast. They actually aren't too far behind the WD Re drives I have (Which are the top of the line 7200 drives...or was before they came out with the new WD Gold drives). Roughly 20MB/s less in sequential read and write, but it's not very drastic.

 

I would stick with RAID1 and software RAID. Hardware RAID costs quite a lot (roughly 400-600 for a decent hardware RAID controller with a RAID card battery).

 

Yeah, I would get a better UPS, usually the ones that don't shut the PC for you when it's low on power generally aren't the good ones.

 

You didn't mention this, but what is your main OS drive? A SSD?

[Captain_WD]

On 8.05.2016 г. at 9:02 PM, knox said:

~snip~

 

Adding on to what @scottyseng suggested (with which I completely agree), RAID1 seems the best option for redundancy for now that would provide some safety against drive failures. This cannot however grant you safety in case something else happens so another option would be to spend the funds for the second RAID1 drive for an external drive where you can have scheduled or continuous backups of your data. 

 

Overhead is something that takes away part of the performance of the RAID due to the quality of the RAID controller, the RAID type itself and other smaller factors. For example, 4-drive RAID5 would have more overhead compared to a 4-drive RAID10 simple because the system has to calculate the redundancy and then write it to the array instead of simply splitting and mirroring the data. 

 

Rebuilding is the process of restoring the data when a drive fails and the you replace it. With basic types such as RAID1 and RAID10 the system simply mirrors back the data from the healthy drives onto the new one which s faster than recalculating everything (the RAID5 and RAID6 case) and then restoring the data. This can have a major effect on the data availability and the performance of the whole RAID during that rebuild both in terms of speed and in terms of time for rebuilding the array.

 

For basic needs you shouldn't notice performance differences between hardware and software RAID. What matters would be the cost of a hardware RAID controller and the ability to migrate the array from one controller to another in case the controller itself fails. Software RAID is much easier to migrate but puts the load on the main hardware of the computer (for the redundancy calculation and the resources needed to handle the RAID) while hardware RAID is very demanding when it comes to migrating but has dedicated hardware that handles everything connected to the RAID. 

 

For simple home usage I would say that your on-board RAID controller should be enough and it wouldn't matter much if you configure your RAID from the BIOS or from Disk Management.

 

Captain_WD.