Re: RAIDING different size drives

David Brown wrote
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.

Wrong. Mirroring is a useful protection against hard drive
failure regardless of what what happens when part of it fails.

If you are are not interesting in recovering when something has gone wrong,

Obviously the OP is.

you might as well backup to write-only media.

Having fun thrashing that straw man ?

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"?

The last half of the last sentence.

Am I wrong in thinking that recovering your data from a hardware RAID with a failed drive is easy?

No.

Or am I wrong in saying I don't know about failure recovery with Windows software raid?

You are wrong about when the OS disk is trashed.

I think you're a little over-keen on telling me everything I say is wrong,

You're lying now. I never ever said that proper backup isnt worth having.

and not too hot on the details. What I am supposed to take away from a comment like that?

That you are just plain wrong on that second half of the last sentence.

If you are trying to inform me that Windows software raid is actually a useful and worthwhile technique,

I didnt even comment on that.

you're doing a bad job of it. If it's just a matter of not caring what I or anyone else learns here,

I wouldnt bother to comment if that was the case.

but you are trying to make me challenge my assumptions,

Nope. I am pointing out where you are just plain wrong.

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

I didnt say it doesnt ever happen. Rare means that it does happen, rarely.

- 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.

Its no news that mounting drives adjacent in a system with
inadequate airflow can see higher than desirable drive temps.

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.

Hardly anyone bothers with TINY servers.

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.

It does however give useful extra protection against hard drive
failure which can be handy when the drive fails between backups.

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.

More have agreed with me on that than have agreed with your claim.

Do you care to give a reference or example showing how a RAID setup can satisfy the requirements of a good backup
system?

Thats an entirely different matter to your original 'does not noticeably improve data security'

Of course it mirroring improves data security, most obviously
with the new data that has showed up between backups.


.

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