Re: RAIDING different size drives

Rod Speed wrote:
David Brown wrote
The extent to which your RAID offers protection depends on your
failure recovery strategy.

Nope.


The benefits of *any* redundancy system are totally dependent on what happens when part of it fails. If you are are not interesting in recovering when something has gone wrong, you might as well backup to write-only media.

If the setup is a hardware RAID of the two drives, it's easy. But
if the setup is based on Windows software RAID, then I don't know
about recovery (having never used this setup), and it may be
difficult if the OS disk is trashed.

Wrong again.


What part of that paragraph was "wrong"? Am I wrong in thinking that recovering your data from a hardware RAID with a failed drive is easy? Or am I wrong in saying I don't know about failure recovery with Windows software raid?

I think you're a little over-keen on telling me everything I say is wrong, and not too hot on the details. What I am supposed to take away from a comment like that? If you are trying to inform me that Windows software raid is actually a useful and worthwhile technique, you're doing a bad job of it. If it's just a matter of not caring what I or anyone else learns here, but you are trying to make me challenge my assumptions, then I guess the response is fair enough.


As a minor point, if the machine in question is physically small
then adding a second disk can raise the temperature of the other
disk by blocking airflow (I've seen that in a tiny server). If you
don't account for this such as by adding extra fans, the higher
temperature will decrease the lifespan of the first disk.

That situation is so rare that it isnt worth considering.


It's realistic enough that I've seen it - the drive temperature was over 45 C while idle, and I expect under heavy use it could easily get to temperatures that are lowering the lifespan. You don't get this tiny servers and NAS systems in professional server setups with controlled environments, but you *do* get them in small networks at home or at small businesses.

I stand by my claim that adding a second drive to a windows machine
and configuring it as RAID is not the best use of money when your
aim is to protect your data files.

You dont know that the OP doesnt have appropriate backup.


No, I don't know what backup system he has now or has planned to use. But his original post looked very much like he thought RAID would give him data security for his files. And as we all know, RAID is not for backup.

Of course, it's difficult to be accurate and specific without more
details from the OP.

But that didnt stop you making a complete fool of yourself.

In short, RAID can improve speed and/or uptime, but it does
not noticeably improve data security,

Wrong.

Raid is for uptime, not for backup.

Thats just plain wrong too.


I'm not sure you'll find many others that agree with you here. Do you care to give a reference or example showing how a RAID setup can satisfy the requirements of a good backup system?

.

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