Help setting up hardware RAID 1

ctviggen · « **on:** 10 Jan 2006, 02:22 pm »

Since I've started burning my CDs into FLAC, I've quickly outstripped my ability to backup my main hard drive to my second hard drive. I had planned on just buying two new hard drives, one for operating system/data and one for backup. I was going to perform a disk copy using software I have (the name of which has temporarily escaped me), then replace my C: with the new drive and backup the new drive with the nameless software. As I went to buy the drives from Newegg, though, I saw this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816116030#DetailSpecs

This is a PCI SATA controller card with hardware RAID 1. This way, I don't have to remember to backup weekly.

I would like to use RAID 1 with my two new drives. I would also like to use these as my OS/data drives. I would like to copy my current C: drive to a first of the new drives, have the RAID controller copy everything from the first new drive to the second new drive. I would then remove IDE drives (c: and u:) and use the two new drives as my bootable drives. This way, I'll have my OS, programs, and data all backed up and hot swappable. Is this possible? Or do I have to reinstall Windows and all other programs to the new drives then transfer the data there, then remove my C: drive?

Levi · « **Reply #1 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 02:49 pm »

There are many ways you can approach this. This is what I would do:

Leave the OS where it is.
Placing your OS on RAID1 may not be a good idea fo 2 reasons. 1) If your OS get's corrupted, it will replicate to the other drive. 2) Performance will be slower. If this is a file server, the performance penalty is neglible. Since availability and I/O subsystem is most important.

Put data in RAID1.
Buy an additional HDD (identical to the one you just bought) and configure it as RAID1. Move your music files to the new partition.

Sit back and relax.

Quote from: ctviggen

Since I've started burning my CDs into FLAC, I've quickly outstripped my ability to backup my main hard drive to my second hard drive. I had planned on just buying two new hard drives, one for operating system/data and one for backup. I was going to perform a disk copy using software I have (the name of which has temporarily escaped me), then replace my C: with the new drive and backup the new drive with the nameless software. As I went to buy the drives from Newegg, though, I saw this:

[url]http://ww ...

ctviggen · « **Reply #2 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 03:01 pm »

Levi, that probably is the best idea. The only detriment is then I'd have four hard drives in my system -- two for RAID 1, one for my OS/programs, and a second to back up my OS/programs. I'm not sure my computer can handle all that power/space! I'm not sure I even have power connectors for all of that (four hard drives, a floppy -- which I rarely use, a DVD-ROM, and a CDROM). I was hoping to lose two drives and then have enough power for the entire system. (I did order two new drives to set up RAID 1.)

meby · « **Reply #3 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 03:32 pm »

The only problem with that is that OS RAID one sucks. If you have valuable data that needs to be kept go out and buy a RAID card.

ctviggen · « **Reply #4 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 03:53 pm »

Meby,

The card I bought is for hardware RAID 1 using two SATA drives. There will be no software RAID. My computer is already maxed out at times just running EAC and the squeezebox; there's no way I'd have it perform software RAID. Plus, I want to set up digital room correction and use this PC for that just to test it out. That'll be another set of complex calculations. Thus, I went hardware RAID instead of software.

Levi · « **Reply #5 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 04:02 pm »

Hey Bob, my suggestion above is the easiest way. If you copied the OS (from c:\ to one of the new HDD and configure RAID1 there is a hardware change and it will not bootup. You may need to repair the OS installation so it will recognize the new hardware and the new partition.

ctviggen · « **Reply #6 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 04:52 pm »

Levi, I do think you're right. I was just hoping for something easy. Now, I might have to buy a new power supply to do what I want. And, I've ordered 320 gig hard drives, which will be way more than I need for audio.

Levi · « **Reply #7 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 04:57 pm »

Hi Bob, Do you have an extra slot for this type of RAID card that you are looking at? It is a 64bit slot. It will work with 32bit slot. You just need the space.
I am just making sure.

ctviggen · « **Reply #8 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 05:01 pm »

Levi,

Honestly, I don't know. I do believe so, but I'm not sure. I'll check tonight (or maybe I'll wait -- NewEgg has already shipped everything and I can find out soon enough).

ctviggen · « **Reply #9 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 05:50 pm »

Actually, this shipped from NJ and will be here today! So, I can check the size tonight. The rest of the stuff (2 hard drives, two power adapters to SATA power) won't be here for a few days.

mizzuno · « **Reply #10 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 06:07 pm »

Quote from: Levi

There are many ways you can approach this. This is what I would do:

Leave the OS where it is.
Placing your OS on RAID1 may not be a good idea fo 2 reasons. 1) If your OS get's corrupted, it will replicate to the other drive. 2) Performance will be slower. If this is a file server, the performance penalty is neglible. Since availability and I/O subsystem is most important.

Put data in RAID1.
Buy an additional HDD (identical to the one you just bought) and configure it as RAID1. Move your music files to the new partition.

Sit back and relax.

# 2 is not entirely accurate, you will get slower writes but faster reads. In the server world, we usually put the OS on a raid 1 partition and data on a raid 5.

Levi · « **Reply #11 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 06:50 pm »

Quote from: mizzuno

# 2 is not entirely accurate, you will get slower writes but faster reads. In the server world, we usually put the OS on a raid 1 partition and data on a raid 5.

In a server world you want to get as close to 99.999% availability. That means you have several fault tolerant in place not just 1, 2 or JBODs possibly more than one servers in a cluster . RAID 1 wil give you slight degradation of read performance; write performance will actually improve. Therefore, you will get the fault tolerant but not the ultimate in performance. You normally use RAID 1 and 5 for servers not workstations.

Since this is a workstation, you want to have fast read and fast write all the time. RAID 1 will not give you that, hence "performance will be slower".

mizzuno · « **Reply #12 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 07:04 pm »

Quote from: Levi

In a server world you want to get as close to 99.999% availability. That means you have several fault tolerant in place not just 1, 2 or JBODs possibly more than one servers in a cluster . RAID 1 wil give you slight degradation of read performance; write performance will actually improve. Therefore, you will get the fault tolerant but not the ultimate in performance. You normally use RAID 1 and 5 for servers not workstations.

Since this is a workstation, you want to have fast read and fast write all the time. RAID 1 will not give you that, hence "performance will be slower".

Levi,

I can't agree with you, read performance would definitely be better than a single drive. Write performance would defintely be slightly worse than a single drive. Writing simultaneoulsy and commiting takes a bit longer. You are correct that raid 1 is not for performance. Unfortunately unless you have raid 1 0 or 5 available there is no other choice for fault tolerance.

ctviggen · « **Reply #13 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 07:05 pm »

Levi,

Supposedly read speed is faster for RAID 1 while write speed is about the same:

http://www.prepressure.com/techno/raid.htm

However, speed isn't my main issue, although having a speedier computer would be nice. I was looking more for ease of use -- the ability to backup OS, programs, and all data without too much trouble. Implementing data on the RAID means that my data is (automatically) backed up, but I'll still have to back up my OS/programs. And I've learned the hard way that losing an OS and all programs just sucks. The benefit to manually backing up the OS, though, is that you can hopefully go back to an OS that works, even though you may lose stuff that occurred since you backed up. The main detriment for me of dual RAID and OS on IDE is the power, as I'm not sure my computer has enough power (or space or power connectors) for everything.

mizzuno · « **Reply #14 on:** 10 Jan 2006, 07:16 pm »

Quote from: ctviggen

Levi,

Supposedly read speed is faster for RAID 1 while write speed is about the same:

http://www.prepressure.com/techno/raid.htm

However, speed isn't my main issue, although having a speedier computer would be nice. I was looking more for ease of use -- the ability to backup OS, programs, and all data without too much trouble. Implementing data on the RAID means that my data is (automatically) backed up, but I'll still have to back up my OS/programs. And I've learned the hard way that losing an ...

maybe you would want to use an images like with norton ghost.

ctviggen · « **Reply #15 on:** 11 Jan 2006, 01:13 am »

Yeah, that's the name of the program I have -- Norton Ghost! I believe it works well, but I haven't had the unluck to test it properly.

As for the card, it does fit. However, there are no extra power connectors, so I had to order a splitter. I'll take out one of my two hard drives and hope that a splitter will drive my two new drives (for RAID). I'll then transfer all data to the RAID drives and I'll backup my main drive to the new RAID drives.

Darn it! I ordered two 256 mB memories, but I only need one. Oh well, I had to order the splitter for the power, so I also ordered a 1GB memory upgrade. I hope New Egg will let me send the other two 256 MB memories back.

Eli · « **Reply #16 on:** 11 Jan 2006, 11:30 am »

Quote from: ctviggen

Since I've started burning my CDs into FLAC, I've quickly outstripped my ability to backup my main hard drive to my second hard drive. I had planned on just buying two new hard drives, one for operating system/data and one for backup. I was going to perform a disk copy using software I have (the name of which has temporarily escaped me), then replace my C: with the new drive and backup the new drive with the nameless software. As I went to buy the drives from Newegg, though, I saw this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816116030#DetailSpecs

There's no way I can stress strongly enough: RAID is _not_ a backup solution. What RAID gives you is this: If a drive fails, then you continue to run without interruption. The alternative, that of using backups, means that if a drive fails, you have some down time while you replace the drive and restore from your backup media, or, in the case of being able to backup to a single drive, of swapping in your second drive. RAID isn't particularly necessary for a music server if you can afford to be down for, say, an hour should a hard disk crash.

The downfalls to believing RAID is a backup solution are many. Accidentally delete some files and they'll be deleted from both drives. Gone. Keeping a RAID array healthy isn't for the faint of heart. If you lose a drive, you have to have the system set up correctly to notify you of the problem. If you're unaware that one disk has failed, then you're much worse off than not having RAID to begin with, as you continue to think you're "protected". If you lose the RAID controller card, you may be able to recover, maybe not, and maybe you'll hose the array in the process.

As for worrying about doing weekly backups - relax. Once your library is completely ripped, how much ripping will you be doing weekly? A couple discs at most? Not really worth worrying about the time lost to restore those couple of disks. A music library is very unlike the dynamic data of a business - you don't need fancy backup software - all you need is to sync the backup disk to make its contents identical to the original. This should be a very quick operation, as only the changed files will need to be written to the backup disk.

I'd recommend getting a relatively small hard disk for the operating system and programs, then two identical disks for your music library and its backup. Get an external USB enclosure for the backup disk and do your backups whenever you remember.

meby · « **Reply #17 on:** 11 Jan 2006, 01:26 pm »

Elis is correct backups are still important. Ghost is a very good program just make sure you try it before you need it. I remember a long time ago when I used to work as a team lead of desk side technicians and I asked a tech if he had ever used ghost before. He said sure, so I sent him to upgrade a managers hard drive as she ran out of space. The dumb ass imaged the blank drive over the one with allthe info on it

Not a tool to learn on the job, although the interface has come a long way in the last 10 years.

ctviggen · « **Reply #18 on:** 11 Jan 2006, 01:40 pm »

If RAID isn't a backup, then I just spent good money for nothing! I'm not sure what other backup system to use then. I like hard drive backups because they're fast and easy to do. If RAID isn't a backup, then I think I should just use the RAID array as my main drive(s), as I believe it'll be faster than my IDE drives. I could then use my current (main) IDE drive as a backup to backup the drives on the RAID controller. My current problem is that my second IDE drive is too small to hold the data from my main IDE drive. However, my main IDE drive is 110 gigs, which should be big enough to act as a backup for my data. Hmmm....More stuff to think about.

So, I can't just copy my current IDE C: drive onto the new RAID drives and boot from new RAID drives (as my new C: drive)? If I did a disk copy using GHOST, I'd copy the entire old C: drive onto the new RAID array. Is there a reason Windows XP wouldn't work? I'd hate to reinstall, as that will take an entire day or even longer.

Another question -- If RAID 1 isn't a backup, then why should I use it? I could use RAID 0 and get increased speed and still use my IDE drive to backup the RAID drives (at least until the size of the info on the RAID is bigger than 110 gigs). If RAID 1 isn't a backup, then it doesn't fit my original plans and makes no sense for me to use it.

woodsyi · « **Reply #19 on:** 11 Jan 2006, 01:56 pm »

Quote

I'd recommend getting a relatively small hard disk for the operating system and programs, then two identical disks for your music library and its backup. Get an external USB enclosure for the backup disk and do your backups whenever you remember.

That's what I thought. You can even buy generic fanless enclosure for this since you won't be running it for long or often. I think about $150 should cover a 300 GB SATA (or IDE) drive and USB2 enclosure.