Yes, another raid question thread :P

[Damien]

Hey I have a quick question.

I'm building a new rig and I'm kinda paranoid of losing data after one of my 200gb died randomely a few months ago, so I planned on putting together 2 large hard drives and using one completely as a mirror in case the other goes down.

What kind of RAID is that? RAID 1 right? Do I need to buy any special RAID controller to do this? Lastly, can I use 2 PATA drives instead of SATA? I can get 2 300gb PATA drives for $160 total, whereas the sata would be in the $220 area.

Thanks a bunch.

[uOpt]

All common RAID levels except 0 have redundancy. RAID-1 is the mirror you want.

I highly recommend not using that onboard SATA controller's RAID support if you want reliability via RAID-1.

The alternatives are either pure software RAID or a dedicated RAID controller. The Areca models seem to be best liked these days.

What you could also consider is a nightly backup cronjob rsyncing all your data to a spare harddrive in a different computer. That is even safer since a PSU killing all your components will usually kill all hrddrives in a RAID, and if you fatfinger the contents of a file you have a true backup. Of course there's some delay if you set it up this way.

[Damien]

All common RAID levels except 0 have redundancy. RAID-1 is the mirror you want.

I highly recommend not using that onboard SATA controller's RAID support if you want reliability via RAID-1.

The alternatives are either pure software RAID or a dedicated RAID controller. The Areca models seem to be best liked these days.

What you could also consider is a nightly backup cronjob rsyncing all your data to a spare harddrive in a different computer. That is even safer since a PSU killing all your components will usually kill all hrddrives in a RAID, and if you fatfinger the contents of a file you have a true backup. Of course there's some delay if you set it up this way.

You mean like, for everything I download, manually copy it over to another hard drive? That sounds pretty convenient as well, I think that's what I'll do considering I don't know jack about RAID :P. It'll take a long time for some things but I guess the extra ~20 mins a night doing that will be worth it in the long run. Just 2 or 3 weeks ago I accidently formatted my 300gb in my sig when trying to make a bootable linux on a pen drive (Inside Security saw "sda1" as my sata drive, not the pen drive) and I lost 230GB of data, alot in which I'll never ever see or get back.

[uOpt]

I don't do that nightly backup manually. A cronjob and rsync over ssh. Look up rsync on the net, it's nifty.

[timpanogos]

See Acronis disk imagining software or the likes. Acronis true image is good stuff