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My PC is a couple of years old, it has the above (as yet unutilised)

To date, I have done HDD to HDD back ups, not taking the time to find out what a Raid facility is.

So today I did a little bit of research, and wondered if it was worth my time - ie will I get a performance hit if I set the drives to mirror?

What do you guys need to know in order to answer this question?

Thanks in advance!

BTW, this is a home PC, and I have a fair amount of data files (music, digital photography, downloaded software with no CD backup etc etc) I like the idea of a continuing backup, a minimal effort on my part type of thing! but no hits to performance - just built my boy his own pc to get him off mine!

Mobo - Asus A78NX
Proc - Athlon XP 2.8+
OS - XP Pro
Graph - Radeon 9700 Pro
HHD - 1x 120GB Maxtor 7200 rpm/1 x 120GB Western Digital 7200 rpm
SCSI/Raid - Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATARaid controller

RAID sets up multiple hard drives and treats them as one. RAID 0 keeps all the storage space of the 2 hard drives and increases speed, but if one of the hard drives in the array is damaged, everything is lost. RAID 1 keeps only half the size of the original hard drives (2x120GB will only have 120GB), but you can recover the data even if one is damaged. RAID 5 sets up three or more hard drives and balances between speed and data security, but since it needs a lot of drives it is expensive.

Ned Flanders is probably the guy you want to talk to about his.

Why do you want to run a RAID? For most home use, it's often a waste of drive space. Unless you have data that you absolutely cannot afford to lose, RAID controllers are (in my opinion) not worth the time and hassle.

Thank you Rookie, that is really helpful!

HLD, LOL! I did search a few posts in here, and recall you asked Sleepy this exact question - so I wasn't surprised, at least you are consistant!

Seriously, I guess I am asking only since I can set up a RAID system if I want to at no further cost as I have it available already. I guess I just want to know if it is worth my while?

In theory I understand the benefits, and also how software RAID is inferior to hardware RAID (though I don't know which mine is ) It is a chip on the Mobo...

In short, I want to be able to back up, I have a lot to lose potentially in my own estimation (though as much on a personal/sentimental level as on an operational level) Disk to disk copying can be onerous, and is reliant on my remembering to do it regularly, and I am way to idle to copy 6GB of photos/videos to CD...the music files would be a real pain too since I have all original CDs and am too idle in that respect - though the idea of having to reload 1500 songs onto a new hard drive would be more than frustrating...I just thought an ongoing back up system would be more useful. Yes, a RAID 1 may reduce the total capacity available to 120GB, but I only use 45 in total on each disk anyway, including full installations of quite a few large RPG games + all mods and add ons - installed way too long ago to remember the order of mod installation (the second drive being a full copy of the first). I bought the second drive literally for back up purposes.

Thanks again

Setting up a RAID wipes everything on the disc. There are no performance loss except the lesser capacity. I don't know if there will be any trouble with RAID on two HDD of different brands, although there probably won't be any problems other than that the speed of the array will be equal to the slower hard drive.

Disk mirroring simply createsa mirror image of whatever partitions you want backed up onto a second drive.As has been said, you lose some capacity in trade-off for the mirror, but as far as performance issues go, the only thing I can think of is you might take a slight hit on the write speed to your drives as a mirror requires the same data to be written twice. On the other side, you might get a small boost to read speed as both drives can be read from simultaneously. It will also allow you to mirror system or boot partitions so as to protect your system from a disk failure. It mirrors partitions and not physical disks though, so if you have multiple partitions you want to mirror you'll have to choose to mirror all of the partitions you want backed up, It won;t just automatically set up the second disk as identical to the first. This will let you play with the capacity loss ass well, for example if you have a 2 120 gig drives and only have say 40 gig you want to mirror, you can just create a 40 gig partition, save all you want to back up onto that partition and mirror it. It should leave you with 80 gig left on both drive to use as you see fit, but just remember only what you actually mirror will be backed up.

It's a good system to run if you have a lot of data that you can't afford to lose and enough HD space to spare so as not to miss the loss of capacity. If you lose one disk, it's just a matter of breaking the existing mirror and creating a new one again.

Disk Striping (Raid 5) requires at least 3 drives to implement. It uses some type of math to keep track of your data across the drives. It starts writing dat on the first disk, jumps to the second, third, then back to the first disk and so on so you basically have all your data spread out over all your disks. It also can be a lot more expensice to set up since you need more drives.

In essance it something like if you have the formula 5+5+5=15, where each number in a disk drive, and you lose one, it can calculate the missing portion. For example, 5+(?)+5=15, it would recognize the missing data as 5. The problem with that is that if something happens to data on more than one disk, it can't make the computations and you still lose everything.

Performance wise, it takes a much bigger hit on write speed since the data is being written across multiple disks as well as the calculations required to ensure recovery. The upside is that you get better read speeds since the data is spread over multiple disks and can be read allows you better acess time. you still take a loss on storage capacity, but it's not as big as with a mirror set since it's more spread out. A thrre disk set would cost you a third of your available storage capacity, a four disk set would cost you a quarter and so on.

If this seems like it rambles, I haven't slept in over 24 hours, so forgive me. Also, it's been a few years since I worked in a network environment, so all this is based on my knowledge of Windows NT, and at the end we simply used ghost to keep a copy of everything on the server and simply ghosted the image down to whatever computer went down on us. they were all identical anyway seeing as the majority of the systems we dealt with were lab computers at a college, so we only had to keep about 4 ghosted images on hand and it took less than ten minutes to set a system back to it's original state that way.

I'm also not guarranteeing I didn;t miss something or that I know half what I;'m talking about in my current state.Like HLD said, it would be wise to talk to Ned since he's still actually in the field

[QUOTE=Yshania]

HLD, LOL! I did search a few posts in here, and recall you asked Sleepy this exact question - so I wasn't surprised, at least you are consistant![/QUote]

The next time you ask a question, I will try to be less predictable.

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