Maybe a stuid question about RAID?!?!?

  • Thread starter Thread starter the froot
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I agree that raid should not be your ONLY form of backup. However, Raid is the only form I know of that allows you to finish a session if a drive crashes, and then work on the repair plan. For me, it is an excellent start. I run raid on my audio drive only so that EVERY wav file gets an automatic backup. Once a week I dump to exernal drives and store them in a different building.

As far as striping being proven safe technology, not a chance. When a striped drive goes down, you often times lose the data on BOTH drives. It only took me one time to learn that and to never make that mistake again. Striped drives however are awesome when you use them as a temporary drive. Like for video and 3D rendering. If it crashes you haven't actually lost data, but just some of your time. I would feel comfortable striping however in a newer raid 5 or 10 setup where my striped drives still get mirrored. I guess I just believe in protecting my data since my clients pay me well enough to expect that.
 
Amra knows his stuff.

To make a long story short.... the best & cheapest solution is to just use a big, fast single drive for recording and back up your data often to DVD.
 
Cheapest? Yes.
Best? depends on how you look at it.

First off, It would scare the hell out of me to know that my only backup of something is on a DVD disc. Very unreliable format (scratches, dings etc....) I would feel much more secure with a tape cartridge or another HD.

Secondly, if you are only using one drive and something happens, you lose ALL work since your last backup. You then also have to get another drive, format it, load it into your computer, transfer all of your back up stuff, and now you are off and recording again. This is pretty much unacceptable in the professional industry. I do understand that this is homerecording.com , but, I am purely addressing the "best and cheapest" part of the comment.

With a RAID mirror set up, one of my two drives can fault. The other drive continues to run and my session continues to progress without a hitch. I have lost NONE of my work, and NONE of my time. When the session is over, then I can back up the remaining good drive, pull the old one out, replace it, and reload it form the still functioning drive MUCH faster than with DVD's that are EASILY succeptible to scratches and dust, and are also succeptible to a slower bus speed, and optical laser errors as well.

I am not saying that Amra does not know what he/she is talking about, nor am I saying that DVD's should never be used for back up. I use them all the time. As my 3rd and portable form of backup. I use a mirrored Raid array, and external drive, and DVD's to back my data up. Since that setup I have NEVER lost data that was not somehow user error. That also means thta at any given time I have a minimum of two back ups and as many as 4 back ups (the 4 belonging to those projects still on my primary audio drive). With digital recording redundancy is probably the one single most important thing to remember. Thats probably why I have more than two terrabytes of drives floating around my studio and house.
 
The bottom line is that no ONE system in itself is a totally secure backup system. Mirrored drives work well against certain types of failures, but they will not protect you against corrupted file system problems ( a power failure can take your computer down in mid write, and when it comes back - your drive(s) act like they are unformatted, I have also seen this caused by system crashes (the dreaded blue screen of death)

You just have to weigh what the risks are. The biggest enemy of hard drives is hot and cold temperature differentials from starting up/cooling down. I can't recall seeing or hearing of a hard drive dying while in use. Probably 90% of the time, it is when you come in and start up your PC from a cold start that you find you HD is dead. Another 5% is a slow dying where you get random read or write errors, and your drive starts acting flaky, and you replace it before it actually dies and becomes unreadable. Maybe 3-5% of the time (and this is being generous), a hard drive might die while in use with no warning.

Basically if you want to mirror your drives, for that statistically, very small probability that is fine. Hell, you could carry a .44 magnum around in downtown chicago in case a grizzly bear happens by too. But for most of us, mirrored drives are a waste of space, or at the least not the best utilization of resources.

A nightly backup will safeguard you against 95% of hard drive failures, and if you want to really follow proper backup procedures, use 7 different tapes. When it comes time to back up, take the previous nights tape and take it home with you (in case of fire or theft), and put in a new tape. Leave it backing up. When you come in the next morning, put the tape you had with you somewhere safe in the office, and take the tape out of the drive with you, and put in a new one. Repeat this procedure every day. Worse case scenario with a fire or theft at either the house or your office you will lose one days worth of work. If you have a theft or fire at both your house AND your office, you either live where you work, or God really, really hates you. Also if you get a virus or system problem (corrupted VSTs, programs, etc) you don't know about, you have 7 days to catch it before you have written over all of your pre-infection, pre-problem backups. You can then save your data, restore your system to a pre-problem condition, and copy your just saved data back over and be up and running.

So for the best combination of performance and security on a HOME RECORDING budget, I would run 2 SATA2 Hard drives in a RAID 0 array, striping for performance, and backup EVERY night.

If it was in a professional environment and you were willing to live with the extra expense, then use RAID 10, or RAID 0+1, and still use a tape backup, backed up every night, with offsite tape storage.

P.S. PC's power supplies are MUCH more likely to die in mid use then a HD. If anything, redundant, hot swappable power supplies might make more sense than RAID 1 from a probabilty standpoint.
 
amra said:
P.S. PC's power supplies are MUCH more likely to die in mid use then a HD
Click to expand...

I know about the power supply experience first hand... While sleeping... CRACK CRACK BOOM! Followed by poision smoke.... Running antec now and I feel much better...
 
OK I'll re-phrase my earlier response:

"The best solution FOR THE AVERAGE HOME RECORDING.COM USER is to just use a big, fast single drive for recording and back up your data often to DVD."

Obviously if you are a professional studio owner you would want to invest in a more secure system.

And my experiance over many years with hundreds of hard drives pretty much echos AMRA comments. Its very rare for a hard drive to just crap out during operation without warning.

I would also suggest to anyone interested in backup security that they invest in some sort of a drive imaging system like Symantec's Ghost, and make regular image backups of their system drives.
 
wow, i didnt know my little RAID question would cause such a discussion. thanks for all the info guys, its much appreciated
 
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