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The Rule of 3 Drives: How to Build your Next PC

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f0dder:
Renegade: flash-based SSDs made these years will probably outlast harddrives, since they aren't prone to mechanical failures, the amount of erase-cycles have been greatly improved, and there's internal wear-leveling algorithms in use as well. Thing with current SSDs is that while their random seek performance is super++, reads and especially writes are still relatively slow, unless you go for the top-of-the-line and sell your kidneys.

Also note that you should use physical drives, not just partitions on the same drive.

And (somebody please link the old thread :)), I would really recommend that you go for one fast system+apps drive (raptor is a good bet), and then chain 2 drives to a RAID MIRROR. Mouser's 3-drive suggestion won't really help you if your data drive crashes, a mirror will (yeah sure, you should be doing automated backups, but if you only do that once per day, you can lose up to 23 hours of work if your data drive crashes. And what if it crashes during a backup? in-con-sis-ten-cy).

Personally I have 2x74gig raptor drives in my box, and a 400gig mirror on a fileserver on a gigabit LAN; too bad windows filesharing is so slow (expect to get 25-30megabyte/sec top, even though the LAN can easily go 90+ meg/s), but it's a lot of peace of mind this way, especially since my bulk storage is separated from my main box.

If I didn't have a fileserver, I'd have gone for one or two raptors, and a raid mirror in my own box. Perhaps external firewire or eSATA case as well, but I don't feel that I need that with my fileserver and all.

And oh, RAID isn't a replacement for backups, it's just a safeguard from when your drive dies from mechanical wear and tear.

Lashiec:
Linked upon f0dder's request

I wonder if Seagate et al. are going to have SSD drives in their lineup. So far, I didn't saw anything out of them... apart from Samsung, but as Renegade will know, is there something Samsung is not manufacturing?

Armando:
(Thanks Lashiec)
f0dder: you use your RAID MIRROR as an "instant restore" backup system ? impossible to use that system with a normal laptop (not talking alienware here...) i guess...

f0dder:
(Thanks Lashiec)
f0dder: you use your RAID MIRROR as an "instant restore" backup system ? impossible to use that system with a normal laptop (not talking alienware here...) i guess...
-Armando (January 06, 2008, 08:09 PM)
--- End quote ---
I use RAID MIRROR as a "oh fsck, the drive died, thankfully I can continue running now (although I should wait until I have a spare disk and can reconstruct mirror), and thankfully I haven't lost up to 23 hours of backups". IN ADDITION TO raid-mirror of your data, you should do regular (and preferably automated) backups to an external storage media (external harddrive enclosure, local or remote fileserver, ...).

No, RAID MIRROR wouldn't really work for a laptop, but neither would mouser's 3 (physical) drive solution :)

An alternative to RAID MIRROR in your workstation, you could do real-time syncing (and I do mean realtime, not something that runs every hour) to a (local, don't even try realtime sync remotely) fileserver with RAID MIRROR... and then do backups from there too.

Oh, and don't even think about RAID-5 (aka parity).

Armando:
An alternative to RAID MIRROR in your workstation, you could do real-time syncing
-f0dder (January 06, 2008, 08:13 PM)
--- End quote ---

Since I only have a laptop, this would be the only viable solution (+ my usual daily backup system on 3 different HD, of course...  :))

What would you use for that (IBM's Tivoli Continuous Data Protection? MirrorFolder?) -- I remember you were looking for something some months ago for your job at the museum  ;)....  And does it consume a lot of resources ???


[edit : added mirrorfolder to my ???]

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