What Do You Use For Backup HD Files?

[Drunner611]

Does anyone here run Raid 1 or 5? I'm building a new pc and I have tons of files that I have, am goign to get, and I'm trying to find the most cost effective way to protect them.

I'm planning on having copies of movies, music, games. Your thoughts?

[fhpchris]

I plan on running a Raid 1 or Raid 5 array of Seagate 320gb 7200.10s

[Drunner611]

I plan on running a Raid 1 or Raid 5 array of Seagate 320gb 7200.10s
Thats what i was considering, exactly, raid 1 320gb 7200.10s, but would it be bad for wear on the drives? Would it be noticeably slower. I guess what i really want to know is cost effectiveness/performance/security under $200.

[perkam]

Best prog out there now: http://www.softwaremedia.com/product/1534.html?ovchn=FRO&ovcrn=10430646&ovtac=CMP&ovcpn=ghost-10.0

Perkam

[Drunner611]

So, basically this is Raid 1, w/out constant copy?

[Silver Bullet]

RAID 1 for me... and the occasional dvd backup of email/my docs.

[Drunner611]

RAID1 sounds good, but does lag teh system at all, or burn out the hd's quicker?

*****IMPORTANT, need to know now. I'm buying OEM hard drives with no cables. Are there SATA 300 cables? Or do I have to use sata 150 cables. I can't find sata 300 cables? Are they both capable of the same speeds?

[Drunner611]

bump, I'm trying to buy 2x320gb 7200.10s from Newegg today before the sale is over. Where can i find sata2 cables? or will regular sata cables work fine?

[Drunner611]

bump, buying within 6 hours now

[[XC] MarioMaster]

not sure, but you may need new ones, the sata connectors on my abit an7 (sata 1) and the ones on my kn9 sli (sata2) are different so i'd say you need new cables

[Daveb2012]

I like the program Easy Recovery..

[[XC] leviathan18]

i use ghost to make my back ups

[Supershanks]

Got 2x80gb Hitachi Sata2's recently, running raid 0. Have tried ghost 10 but recovery failed what works extremely well now is Acronis True Image 9.1 (http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/) have it run a scheduled full image every night.

luck:)

[Drunner611]

Thanks for all your Raid answers, I have decided to run Raid 1, until I can get my hands on ghost or Acronis so my hd's don't burn up.

BUT, question still unanswered, where can i get cables for SATA2 hd's? I only see sata1. Is there a difference?

[Helmore]

No you don't need a special cable for SATA2, SATA2 is completely backward compatible with SATA1, they even use the same cable and plugs.

[stevecs]

I've always used some form of raid for my discs, at least since about 1987 or so, ever since you could get a 4GB drive for under $1500 bucks. ;) As for which to use for performance if you have a good fast raid card (not the cheapo < $600 buck cards) you want to probably stay away from raid 3,4,5 & 6 if you are looking for performance. The CRC checksums just kill the onboard cpu's. RAID 0 I won't really talk about as that's not really a raid. RAID 1 is decent you get nX the read performance (n=# drives in mirror, ie, you can have the a normal 2-way mirror so you get 2x the reads, but you can create a 3 or 4way mirror and get 4x the reads et al, writes are limited to 1x for all combinations).

Now if money isn't an object the best performance solution w/ redundancy would be a raid 1/0 or 0/1 config (depending on your setup you may have external towers in which case you may need to do the later 0/1, most of the time you will see 1/0 though). This lets you increase both write & read performance at the cost of the number of drives you need. You can have 6 drives put them into two sets of 3 as two raid 0 arrays and then mirror both raid 0's with a raid 1.

Now if space is needed and you are willing to sacrifice performance then raid 5 or 6 are probably the better ones today. Ideally a seperate set of spindles would be good for each function (ie, windows or OS partition on one set of spindles, and the datastore on another). But I've found that as long as you don't have any swap partitions (ie, turn off all swap crap in the system, or under linux don't use a swap partition (granted you need memory to do this I usually find that 2GB is a good starting point if you're playing games) then the spindle issue is not really there anymore as you don't really have the competing updates to the drives to slow you down.

Software raid also gives more flexability but then you're using your main cpu to do the functions for you stealing resources. It _will_ be faster than any raid card out there, however. The only caveat is that to get full speed you probably won't have the cycles availble to do anything _with_ the speed. ;)

Right now I've got several systems with various formats of raid, my 'data' system has a raid 0/5 setup (three raid-5 external towers ~2TB each, stripped with a raid-0 array on top of that to get me 3x the performance in read/write (the extenal raid towers were relatively cheap and I needed mass storage (reason for raid5 here) but the cpus for the cards suck so distribute the load across 3 of them to get to reasonable performance). Boot drive in that system is a raid-1 (2-way). Another system I have is a raid 1/0 (4-drive) two raid-0 arrays mirrored, gives pretty good performance on that but I'm looking to rip that out (it's using older scsi disks, I want to re-build with a SAS raid controller and use 6 raptors in that one for another 1/0 for a new gaming system. Then another 'throw-away' system is running a multi-raid three disks with two physical partitions each 16GB from each disk is used as a 3-way raid-1 mirror, the remainder of the disk is used as a raid-5 set.

But the real question that started this was backup software ;) I normally find that Acronis is probably the most robust backup (partition & files) that is availble out there now. Used to use ghost for windows and various means for linux but acronis makes it so much easier to do either.