To RAID or not to RAID

Recently my OS failed (it was my fault.) The HD's were in a RAID1 array. My failure was a software failure, so the RAID was not particularly helpful. Now, since I have two drives, I'm thinking of having a single master with a slave as a frequent backup, sort of a manual mirror.

Any thoughts as to which is a better setup?

 

I have a RAID.0 Striped with 2 x 120 gig partitioned as 20 Gig for OS & progs and the rest for data storage. Another 250 Gig EIDE Drive doubles up for safety/backup. I have been running this for a couple of years with no probs, have you thought along these lines.. ???

 

I like your idea as it will CYA for a lot more situations than RAID-1. You should read the articles on anandtech.com and storagereview.com about IDE RAID (0, 1, 0+1) to help firm up your conceptual base.
. Instead of making your backup drive a slave, consider an external enclosure (Firewire is best, but high speed USB will do). Conceivably a hardware failure or power surge or spike, etc. could take out both drives resident within the case - then where would you be?

.bh.

 

I have a question about that....beucase I have been considering buying an External....

Sorry to interupt Doug...

Are external HDDs as fast as Internal? Not as in RPMs...but as in Communication time with the CPU and RAM

 

Unexperienced, no problem. I have an external drive that I use for backups, its USB 2 and Firewire, and its pretty darn slow when moving lots of data. My hope is an internal drive will be much faster.

Zepper, thanks for referrals, I will have a look. THe power spike issue, or some malicous attack that corrupts data, killing both drives is something to consider. I considered unplugging the slave from the MOBO when not backing up, but all that "plugging-unplugging" seems risky to the MOBO, etc.

And Toke, I like the EIDE drive backup, because one of my problems now is that the SATA drives in one box cant interface with the EIDE in my other box.

 

With the very latest drives, an external enclosure may not be as fast as if the drive were internal but it is still A LOT faster than any other form of external backup.
. At places like SVC.com you can get a card slot cover with jacks for a bare SATA drive (both power and data). It is also available in a 3.5" drive bay model and in the old IDE connector layout too. That way you can have an external drive sans enclosure. The disadvantage is that those are generally not Hot Pluggable.

.bh.