I Guess That's Why I Run RAID

[crokett]

Ugh. Built the first PC I could call my own in 1995. Up until last year, nary a virus, HDD failure or any other bad things. Last year one of my ancient 70GB SCSI drives failed (surplus enterprise-class from work, they lasted a good long while) so I went to 2 500GB SATA. One of those borked sometime today. Rebooted the PC after doing some updates, it was hanging at the RAID controller. Took a few minutes to figure out which drive was hanging it. At least it is still under warranty, it is less than a year old.

[BobSch]

RAID has saved a lot of people's butts, which is why it's so popular (As you obviously know! )

Kinda tough on a laptop, though.

[crokett]

If I had a way I'd run it on a laptop. Best I can do is daily syncs to my desktop at work and weekly to a USB attached drive.

[pelligrini]

RAID burned mine once. Some idiot in my house put a bunch of photos on a striped array and lost couple months of photos due to a failed drive and a poor backup regimen.

[crokett]

I'd never run striped RAID without parity. That's just asking for trouble. If you have, say 3 drives in an array, then you are 3 times as likely to have a failure as a single drive. My machine runs a mirrored set.

[LinuxRandal]

And people B&M when I say to use Raid. "It isn't a backup"

While not a TRUE backup, this has been what most of my "come fix this for me" problems have been (one DEAD drive, and everything on it).

Raid nowdays, is too cheap NOT to do. (and still people don't understand, or listen)

[woodturner]

And people B&M when I say to use Raid. "It isn't a backup"

Depends on which level of raid - mirrored backup is, well, a backup. Striped arrays are not.

[crokett]

Depends on which level of raid - mirrored backup is, well, a backup. Striped arrays are not.

From someone who has been in the enterprise computing business a long time, RAID is not a backup. RAID (mirrored or striped with parity) is high availability. A backup is copying the data off the system to somewhere else. So I run a mirrored set on the PC and back up the data to an external drive.

[cabinetman]

From someone who has been in the enterprise computing business a long time, RAID is not a backup. RAID (mirrored or striped with parity) is high availability. A backup is copying the data off the system to somewhere else. So I run a mirrored set on the PC and back up the data to an external drive.

I got really confused with this topic. I thought it was about the roach and ant spray, which BTW, Raid is excellent, and I highly recommend it. I had no idea there was a RAID for computers. I learn something new every day. Thanks for the post.
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[LinuxRandal]

I got really confused with this topic. I thought it was about the roach and ant spray, which BTW, Raid is excellent, and I highly recommend it. I had no idea there was a RAID for computers. I learn something new every day. Thanks for the post.
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If you find a Raid for computers that can get rid of all the bugs, that some software has, you have found a goldmine.

[pelligrini]

Depends on which level of raid - mirrored backup is, well, a backup. Striped arrays are not.

Yes and no, I consider mirrored or striped with parity more of a safety net, with mirrored being the safest. You can loose a drive and still keep your data intact.

I wouldn't call it a backup. It doesn't protect you from catastropic failure of an array. If a file gets corrupted, it is corrupted on the mirrored drive too. Every once in a while I have to restore an old drawing file at the office from one of my different backups because a file got hosed.

[Kristofor]

And people B&M when I say to use Raid. "It isn't a backup"

While not a TRUE backup, this has been what most of my "come fix this for me" problems have been (one DEAD drive, and everything on it).

Yep, from a problem avoidance perspective it covers >50%. At the same time it doesn't help at all when they press the delete key by mistake. Worth doing more often than not but another backup strategy is still required as well.

Raid nowdays, is too cheap NOT to do. (and still people don't understand, or listen)

Yes and no... 3 years ago I would have agreed hands down. However, things have changed a bit for the moment. The biggest general PC performance improvement in years (decades?) comes from running a fast SSD as your system drive. The speed puts a velociraptor or 15K SCSI drive to shame.

The difference is so dramatic that I wouldn't recommend a new PC using a mechanical system drive unless having the lowest possible price was the absolute top priority. As the die shrinks occur and volumes build the prices are getting better, but they're still not at the point where most home users are going to run a mirrored pair. For a critical data drive mirroring a mechanical drive can still make good sense.

I also now have >30TB of space on my boxes at home. The vast majority of that content is covered by a raid flavor that can allow multiple drives to fail without losing the remaining content but is not backed up. The backup would come from re-ripping my DVD & Blu-Ray collection which would be a royal pain in the butt but not enough to justify the cost of a backup scheme for that volume of data.

[pelligrini]

I also now have >30TB of space on my boxes at home.

Dang, how much porn does one guy need to keep?!?

[woodturner]

A backup is copying the data off the system to somewhere else. So I run a mirrored set on the PC and back up the data to an external drive.

Ahh, now I see your point, and I agree. I was thinking of it from the standpoint of being able to recover data - and the spec does use the terminology "mirrored backup".

But your point is well taken - an off site archival backup is more reliable than an on-site backup. I've seen systems where they used the same drives for the backups - very, very bad idea.