RAID questions.

wcavanagh

wcavanagh

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Right,

I understand a mirror pair holds same data on each drive, should one die the other continues, you swap out and it rebuilds.

So RAID 10 seems to be popular.

But if preformance is not a big issue, can you mirror say 4 drives, that way upto 3 drives could fail.

Or am I missing the point?

Cheers
 
In theory you could, however even high-end RAID systems usually allow only up to 3-way mirroring. It's often used to break off a mirror regularly for backups (removing one drive from the mirror and taking a backup of it as it contains a single point of time image).

Just remember, RAID just protects against drive failures. If you or a run away piece of software deletes everything, it'll be gone from all drives. Better to have a 2-disk mirror and backup that to other drives every night. Personally I prefer snapshot-based systems where only the changed data is stored for each backup - like Apple's Time Machine or NetApp filers.

RAID 6 or "dual parity RAID5" could be something to look at, it's a striped raid set where 2 drives can fail without loss of data.
 
Personally, I'd only treat a RAID array as a way to avoid downtime. If a drive fails you can continue to work whilst you insert the replacement drive to rebuild the array. So in a way I see no point in having 3 redundancy drives or even two.

The only exception to that is RAID0, why its called a RAID I don't know as it offers no redundancy at all, just performance.

You should also do backups to a external drive and take it off-site, or buy two and keep one on-site and one off-site.
 
Cool, it will be photo storage, backup will be done nightly to a different location over a LAN. Looking for something to keep me going over a drive fail. All part of my business plan at the moment.
 
I run one of these which supports all types of configs. Easy to setup and maintain over running an in system setup (i.e: in your tower / server). Especially for beginners and those wanting to save time.
 
neil_g said:
another :thumbs: for netgear stuff, i run the NV+ units
Click to expand...

:thumbs:

A side note, if your planning on running a networked setup make sure you do it wired over a Gigabit switch. 10/100 is very slow when transferring multiple gigabytes of information.
 
I am not thinking of RAID as a backup, but as a way to keep my machine up and running with clients photos I am working on. I have a networked system in the shed, that is backed up too every night. This way I have two locations with the same data in.
 
wcavanagh said:
I am not thinking of RAID as a backup, but as a way to keep my machine up and running with clients photos I am working on. I have a networked system in the shed, that is backed up too every night. This way I have two locations with the same data in.
Click to expand...

id concider more distance..

fire and theft are 2 examples that could wipe out both sets of data.
 
Well the shed is 200 foot away down the bottom of the garden, and no sign of any cables, all underground. Dont see how I can get any more distance, chances of house and shed fire are small, same with theft, i would guess they would do one or the other.

Need to be as covered as I can, without being too silly.
 
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