RAID is protection against electrical or mechanical failure of the
drive. But I think it's much more likely that you'll have a software or
virus related failure and the RAID solution simply guarantees that
you'll propagate the problem (which could include deletion or corruption
of lots of data) to both copies.
What I've been doing for the last couple of years is making a boot disk
clone in an external USB enclosure using the Seagate software that's
designed to replicate the drive for a size upgrade. I use the Seagate
software since (unlike the Western Digital version) it's only slightly
fussy about the brand of the destination drive and can be fooled into
writing to a USB drive which it normally doesn't want to do. Once a
bootable drive has been created it can then be maintained by normal
backup software to keep it current. But I don't try to keep it really
current. I only back it up periodically and when I'm reasonably sure
that the system seems stable. I really have no idea what normal backup
software might or might not be doing relative to the registry so perhaps
there's a big hole in this methodology but I also sometimes re-run the
Seagate utility and recreate the entire boot drive from scratch.
I also backup more frequently to other drives which are just data drives
and are not required to be bootable. Between the two methods I think
I'm reasonably well protected but I'd be interested in hearing if
there's a big hole in my thinking or a much easier way to do it.
Now that I have the new fire breathing core duo machine I need to change
from USB to eSATA so I was interested in your comments there. I read a
review of a Seagate 500GB eSATA drive which stated that the drive came
with a PCI SATA card which had external connectors. I wasn't aware of
the jumpers from motherboard to expansion slot header so I'll have to
check the motherboard to see if there's an SATA socket or two available.
Chuck Norcutt
Moose wrote:
> I bought the new box with a single WD 250 gb SATA 300 disk. I separately
> bought another WD of the same sort and two WD 500 gb SATA 300 disks.
>
> The plan was to install the second 250 in the box to be kept as a backup
> for the boot disk, one 500 in the box and one 500 in an eSATA external
> enclosure for back-up of the internal one.
>
> My question is about the possible use of RAID 1 for the two 250 gb
> disks. The controller on the mother board supports all sorts of RAID
> configurations and the BIOS loads RAID support.
>
> Reading the Intel documentation, it looks to me like RAID 1 would be
> better than any other ghost/mirror/whatever scheme for backing up the
> boot disk. It says that all data is completely duplicated in such a way
> that failure of either disk won't even crash the machine, let alone keep
> it from booting with no loss of anything. then one may install a
> replacement, which will be automatically brought into the array. Read
> speed may even be enhanced under some circumstances with a dual
> processor where two requests for different data may be served at once
> from different disks. They say only occasional, small write speed
> penalties should be encountered. Sounds perfect.
>
> Anybody know if they are blowing smoke in any important way such that I
> shouldn't implement this as my primary back-up strategy? Yes, I have two
> more external drives of 250 & 500 gb for off site backup too.
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