Raid 1

[penguin]

I was reading the earlier topic about backing up to an external hard disk and to me one of the drawbacks of having an external backup is the high cost of the enclosure required. I've seen them as cheap as 300 baht but for that price they run very hot. The good enclosures seem to cost more than a complete new case with a generic PSU.

Apart from the lack of portability is there any reason not to run two hard disks in a Raid 1 array as a back up solution?

[Guest Reimar]

I was reading the earlier topic about backing up to an external hard disk and to me one of the drawbacks of having an external backup is the high cost of the enclosure required. I've seen them as cheap as 300 baht but for that price they run very hot. The good enclosures seem to cost more than a complete new case with a generic PSU.

Apart from the lack of portability is there any reason not to run two hard disks in a Raid 1 array as a back up solution?

If you want to run RAID 1, think about the cost: very high! Because standard Raid System run on SCSI!

A good alternative, if you can use USB and IDE, use the drive from OKER. There's some on the market with buildin Power Supply and cooling fan and cost around Baht 800 and from the size is around the sixe of an CD-Rom drive.

I use that boxes with 200 GB harddisk for Backup on costumers place or carry data around. Never get to hot or other problems.

[Tywais]

I use that boxes with 200 GB harddisk for Backup on costumers place or carry data around. Never get to hot or other problems.

Even though you can run Raid on ATA & SATA drives the mainboard must support it or you have to use software raid (large performance hit). I have two external USB boxes, each with 300GB drives in them, with fan and power supply internal and performs nicely and doesn't get hot. More flexibility in they can be moved to another computer plus you don't have to have them powered on all the time when your computer is running.

[rio666uk]

no reason why not run RAID 1

it offers redundancy but no performance increase and you are halving your storage due to the second drive being the mirror... nothing wrong with it all. The benefit comes when you have a disk failure, your system can and will continue to work on the remaining disk no trouble.

depends what sollution youre after really.

[penguin]

Motherboard is Asus P5B-VM which supports Raid 0 and Raid 1 configuration. I have one 250Gb hard disk so only extra cost is for another 250Gb hard disk, plenty of space and with a 120mm intake fan blowing across the drive bays both will be kept cool.

Having a mirror is more important for me than more storage, my most important files l still back up to a 2Gb flash drive and to DVD. With an E6400 performance is okay. I wanted to make sure there wasn't any downside to using Raid 1 and from your answers there doesn't seem to be for me, sounds good so l'll go ahead and buy another hard disk, thanks.

[hughden]

Agree with Rio666.

Most recent motherboards will support RAID (you don't need SCSI). Hard drives are relatively cheap so doubling up your drives is not a big cost.

If you are installing XP on RAID1 it can be a bit of a fiddle. I cheated by putting XP on a separate drive, and then have 2 drives in RAID 1 for all the data I want to keep safe.

[penguin]

If you are installing XP on RAID1 it can be a bit of a fiddle. I cheated by putting XP on a separate drive, and then have 2 drives in RAID 1 for all the data I want to keep safe.

Can you explain why you needed to do that?