Thinking of RAID'ing my dual SSD's - Windows 10

[gguerra]

Originally Posted by Trekker99

But it's not a backup of the data.

RAID ensures that you have data "availability" (if a drive fails the file access is preserved), but it is NOT a backup of the data.

A backup would be either to tape or to another storage device, like another RAID, or a simple disk.

Never said it was a backup. My post was about how easy it was to rebuild a failed drive in a RAID 10 array.

I always backup my servers to NAS. Even if the whole array comes down for any reason, I can rebuild the whole array from scratch.

RAID 1 is in fact mirroring and in effect a backup but certainly not in a practical sense.

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by Trekker99

The other scenario you forgot to include is user error, which also is very real where someone saves an inadvertent file change,

I did include that. "saved files that should not have been saved," This is not something specific to RAID1 though, if you are overwriting files in your backup and fail to recognize your error then same thing applies.

RAID1 has the benefit of being instant backup or state of the current files if you don't like the term backup, if you are making edits and changes to files constantly you lose all that going back to your last backup to external storage. Downside is it's instant backup of the current state of the files.

There is no one backup scheme that works well unless you were backing up independent copies of file changes to external storage as they occur, preferably offsite. Of course that can get ridiculously large and expensive.

As I said I would suggest it should be the frontline in your backup scheme. It shouldn't be the only thing you are relying on.

I have single SSD I use for OS and applications. Two large HDD's in RAID1 configuration for personal data. Quick tip, on Windows you can right click something like Documents and change it's location. Anything that defaults to that folder will load it from that location. With the cost and size of SSD's being fairly reasonable now I'll be ditching this for just two drives on next rig.

I have external drive for regular backup. I keep additional backups of critical stuff in cloud storage and some USB keys. Stuff to be archived as permanent backup like photos and video including a large collection of DV tapes in a a closet in my parents house. I've also been adding some more important stuff to optical disc recently as additional backup, it's impervious to ransomware once it's written.

[markjames68]

Originally Posted by gguerra

All of our servers at our company are RAID 10. They all use 4 drives. I've had one or two drives go out over the years, the things keep working. Since these are hot-swappable drives, all you have to do is set the bad one to offline, pop it out, replace with a new drive, place it online and it rebuilds automatically without even shutting down the machine. We use Dell servers and WD drives. Very reliable setup in my experience.

Generally they're very reliable. And you can tolerate 2 failures as long as one mirror is intact (meaning one mirror goes offline and the other is still OK).

In my case it was a failing controller and not bad drives. Another reason why I generally go with drive pools in software now and "straight through" controllers. I can set up the pool for mirroring and even use dissimilar disks. And then I back it up to another drive, and also to cloud storage. FreeNAS is great for this.