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Living Room / Re: Not backing up will cost you!
« Last post by worstje on December 24, 2010, 09:11 PM »I'm glad I didn't go through that. 
I must say though.. I have a similar experience which caused me to drop RAID as a whole.
RAID is meant to to improve reliability, at least in the variety you mentioned as well as the variety I used. But in practice, one drivers/controllers RAID is a totally different beast from the next. So once stuff reaches something that can't be automatically handled (which is surprisingly often the case), you're up shits creek.
Why does it happen so often? Because you tend to set up an array using the same hard drives. Often, if you order them at the same time, it is the same batch. So once one drive breaks, the other one isn't far away. That is what happened to me.
Simply using non-RAID, and setting up a proper backup plan has proven to be a far more resilient course of action for me. Yes, once one drive breaks, I am stuck a few hours as I fix my situation up to get stuff back out of my backups. But my backup drives do not spin 24/7 like my main drives do, and drives failing is still supposed to be a very infrequent happening. So, once shit does happen to hit the fan, I find that I am in a far more comfortable situation regarding fixing stuff myself.
Seriously, do the math: buy a few more harddrives, which costs, say, $200. Or end up going your route, and shell out $4000 once stuff really goes wrong. And with my method, I have the flexibility to have my backups go to an external site (less chance of theft/fire/etc beating my backups through conventional means).
And that is why, for me, RAID is an expensive concept consumers tend to not really need.
Edit: seems someone else beat me to the 'other accidents' point of view.
I must say though.. I have a similar experience which caused me to drop RAID as a whole.
RAID is meant to to improve reliability, at least in the variety you mentioned as well as the variety I used. But in practice, one drivers/controllers RAID is a totally different beast from the next. So once stuff reaches something that can't be automatically handled (which is surprisingly often the case), you're up shits creek.
Why does it happen so often? Because you tend to set up an array using the same hard drives. Often, if you order them at the same time, it is the same batch. So once one drive breaks, the other one isn't far away. That is what happened to me.
Simply using non-RAID, and setting up a proper backup plan has proven to be a far more resilient course of action for me. Yes, once one drive breaks, I am stuck a few hours as I fix my situation up to get stuff back out of my backups. But my backup drives do not spin 24/7 like my main drives do, and drives failing is still supposed to be a very infrequent happening. So, once shit does happen to hit the fan, I find that I am in a far more comfortable situation regarding fixing stuff myself.
Seriously, do the math: buy a few more harddrives, which costs, say, $200. Or end up going your route, and shell out $4000 once stuff really goes wrong. And with my method, I have the flexibility to have my backups go to an external site (less chance of theft/fire/etc beating my backups through conventional means).
And that is why, for me, RAID is an expensive concept consumers tend to not really need.
Edit: seems someone else beat me to the 'other accidents' point of view.
)
icon. (On XP anyway.)
Which I hope is intentional.
