Do You Use A RAID?

What is your opinion of it?

I'm thinkning of getting the <a href="http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/proddetail.html?sess=no&prodkey=AAR-1200A&cat=%2fTechnology%2fRAID%2fATA+RAID"><font color="blue">Adaptec ATA RAID 1200</font></a> for my tower computer merely to run a 2nd drive as a "mirror" of the first to prevent data loss in case either of the drives crashes.

A "mirror" drive is a second drive that is an <I>exact</I> duplicate of the first drive. Every time data is added to, or changed, or deleted, from the first drive, the same action happens on the second drive. The idea of a RAID "mirror" drive is that if one or more drives in the RAID fails, the system simply reports the failure, and keeps right on running.

At a MSRP of about US$100 (about US$60 street) for the card, this seems like both a low cost and an easy method to "back up" <i>all</i> the files on a drive, when compared to the time and effort of rebuilding from scratch with a new drive, or sending the crashed drive to a recovery company. I've got a lot of complex PagePlus files, and other files, that losing them would be a small disaster, and rebuilding from backup disks would take quite a while.

Comments? Opinions?

Thanks.

Edited/added: I've found a SIIG brand of RAID card for about the same price as the ADAPTEC card.

Jim B. * :>)

Photography - It's all in how you look at it.

Jim,
you asked for thoughts, well this is just thinking aloud. If as you say the same action happens on both drives at the same time, what if you accidently delete a file in error, or a file gets corrupted or overwritten with the wrong version, even some new virus problem. Also what if your pc gets stolen. I have a second drive which I move items to reasonably often just as a safety measure. I also have a cd writer with directCD so you can drag and drop if needed which lets me keep backups out of the machine

I save a document as I go along, then if appropriate I move odd items whilst still in say pp8 and using the document,I open the save_as dialogue, then select that file in the list and rightclick, then on the context menu/sendto I have my alternative drive (or cdwriter) which I select and send a copy of the document to that drive and carry on working.

Keith

Hi, Keith.

Thanks for the reply. You have some good points about backing up files.

I have a <I>files</I> &nbsp;backup system that I use regularly. I also do sequential backups of critical and important files while I'm working on them.

I'm considering the RAID card as a form of automamtic <I>hardware</I> &nbsp;backup to guard against the "fun" of a partial or total hard disk drive failure, then having to reinstall Windows and D/Ling all the updates, then reinstalling all my applications and having to reload all the data, etc.

Jim B. * :>)

Photography - It's all in how you look at it.

Jim,

Like Keith, I don't use a RAID or mirror drive, so I can't provide any help in how good it is. But it sounds like you may have too much of a dose of paranoia. I don't back things up as often as I probably should, which in my case should be as soon as I finish a file. However, I always make changes, even when finished, that backing up to a CD would mean buying a case every month or so. :-) Instead, what I do is after a paper is out, go back and delete all the stuff used (photos, text files, pdf files I had to create to get a page to print, etc.), then move that to a different HD. About once a month, I'll make a CD of all the files in a folder (say, 2002 issues). When I get enough files to perhaps fill half a CD, I'll make two of them, and move one off-site.

Unless you link images and such, I can't see 'rebuilding' a file, no matter how complicated. You simply open it.

Don't get me wrong - I can see a big advantage to what you propose doing, provided it doesn't put a noticeable drain on processing time. Last year, thanks to just bad timing, I lost five pages of work, that took probably 30 hours to do. If the HD had waited a day or two before dying, I would have had it backed up. Paying $60 to not have to redo everything would be cheap.

Mike

Jim,

Adaptec promotes the card to be used to mirror drives on a server, which makes perfect sense in the case of hosting web space. Servers need to be able keep everything as is -- constantly, therefore creating a need for immediate replacement should the main drive fail. I would be concerned though, with the point Keith made about dual foul-ups; I have had to start from scratch more than once. Would a mirror drive mean twice the fun?

In the case of personal computing, I think the most important thing is data recovery...via the shortest route possible. Replacing apps is no big deal but recovering backup data is a real pain. I think I would opt to use the second drive to duplicate the data folders on the main drive and then just install apps to drive 2 if drive 1 fails. Would also be a good idea to keep a copy of important files offsite in case of the dreaded theft, fire, etc. I will occaisionally email myself a data file as an attachment to one of my free web email addresses or to one of my web site pop accounts. That way I can easily pull it back onto my harddrive after recovering from a crash, or Heaven forbid, a user related disaster. (can't blame it on HB since I have never had it.)

Opinion submitted. Your judgement has proven(proved?) to be most wise in the past. Let us know how it works out.

Mark

Jim,

How good are you at cd burning? What some friends and I have done is after the initial install of the OS and all the hardware drivers is to install the cd burning software and create a bootable backup of the HDD at that point. Save that disk in a very safe place and then proceed to load all the other apps. All the files get saved off to cd or zip disk depending on the size.

This way your downtime is negligable if the hard drive goes belly up and you need to replace it.

The raid idea is a good one if you absolutely cannot have any downtime in your workflow.

My 2 cents, ymmv,

Becky

Do not tease dragons, for you are crunchy and good with catsup and mustard.

Hi Jim B.
There are some concerns in this post should the computer be stolen, this can be overcome by fitting one of the drives into a Hard Disk Caddy, which only cost about 10GBP. This means that you can move this drive wherever you wish. I do Payroll for some friends and when I organised their computer I partitioned their main drive and ALL the data plus the Payroll & Accounts programs are on one partition. I then take with me a separate drive, this is in a caddy which fits my and their machines, onto this I have a copy of all their Data up todate. I take this home with me and I even keep a further copy on my machine, so if their machine were to be stolen or badly damaged we would only lose at most one week's data.

For my own machine I have another system, I have two hard drives and I regularly take a Symantec Ghost image of the partitions onto the second drive, so this keeps things OK in the case of drives going down - and from my own experience - they do regularly. I also keep a Ghost image of my C: drive with only the OS and drivers on, so I can always return to this situation. I find that if I have a problem with the Glorious Windows, I don't mess about I just restore from the latest Ghost image - so speedy and sure and more to the point easy.

Bert

Ghost is an excellent program. I've used it from before Symantec got its grubby paws on it although the newer version does have some nice new features on it.

Becky
Do not tease dragons, for you are crunchy and good with catsup and mustard.

Hi Becky,

Same here, this magic program was the work of a small New Zealand company, who Symantec bought out. I must admit that there are a few advantages in 2001 - v6.5, over the first I had (5.1), I do like the ability to burn the image onto a CD, all done on a single floppy! I also like the Ghost Explorer and its facilities.

I bet you it has NEVER let you down! Mine hasn't, nor any of my many friends who use it.

Bert

Bert,

What? Your freinds haven't let you down? Great friends.

Geoff Barns

<IMG src='ViewAttachment.asp?Attach=471'>

I use Raid myself with Striping (level 0) rather than Mirroring across 2*60GB Hard drives, with a further 2*60GB Hard drives for less important files (ie, games).

Mirroring (level 1) is a good idea if your data is critical, but remember you loose hard drive space. Say you have 2*10GB Drives set up for Mirroring, you only have 10GB total hard drive space to use.

Periodically, whenever I make major changes to my OS, I will back up my OS Partition using GHOST. Works a treat and you can get your system back up and running in no time at all should you need to.

As for your working files, I tend to drop them to either DVD-R/RW or CD-R/CD-RW.

<p style="text-align: right; font-size: 1em; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; background-color: #eeeeee; color: #000000; padding: .3em; border: 2px #000000 dashed;">"illusions born of the air, something seems so precious there...." * *<a style="text-decoration: none; color: #c0c0c0; padding: .2em; background-color: #2e2e2e;" href=http://www.leemulligan.com>Lee Mulligan</a></p>

Thats probably the best way to do it Lee. Cheapest too.

Becky

Do not tease dragons, for you are crunchy and good with catsup and mustard.

Thanks to all for your comments and suggestions.

I think what I've decided to do is get the <a href="http://www.siig.com/products/ide/features/UltraATA100_RAID.html"><font color="blue">SIIG UltraATA 100 PCI RAID</font></a> card and run two 40 GB HDDs in RAID mode 0/1 (aka mode 10 or mode 1+0).

I'll also continue to periodically back up important folders to CD-R, and backup critical files to ZIP disk using the IOMEGA program "QuickSync". And, I'll continue to make sequential copies of files as they are modified.

Jim B. * :>)

Photography - It's all in how you look at it.