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Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:14:00 No.17272871 View View Reply Original Report

Im looking into making a long-term backup RAID array. Should I be using RAID-1 or RAID-5? Speed and stuff aren't really an issue, all I want is something that will keep me from losing my data.

Also, are there any good guides on setting up RAIDs and the like? I haven't been able to find anything that isn't complete shit.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:16:00 No.17272894 Report

Quoted By: >>17272918

RAID is an uptime solution. It's not for backups.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:20:00 No.17272918 Report

Quoted By: >>17272927 >>17272946 >>17272982

>>17272894
Whats wrong with using RAID for backups? I don't want all my backups to be lost because one HDD fails.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:21:00 No.17272927 Report

Quoted By: >>17272953

>>17272918
expensive as fuck compared to tape backups

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:23:00 No.17272946 Report

Quoted By: >>17272979 >>17273005

>>17272918
And what do you think will happen when one of the drives in the raid array fails?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:23:00 No.17272953 Report

Quoted By: >>17272959 >>17273005

>>17272927
Tape is annoying as shit. If you want consumer grade backup, it's much easier and probably cheaper to just use a few 2GB USB drives.

>>17272871
How much data do you want to store?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:24:00 No.17272959 Report

Quoted By:

>>17272953
>2GB USB drives.
hurr durr I meant 2TB

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:24:00 No.17272963 Report

Quoted By:

Assuming n is the number of equally-sized usable data volumes worth of data:
RAID 1, amount of volumes needed = 2n
RAID 5, n + 1
RAID 6, n + 2
RAID 5 and 6 are more efficient, as the number of 'extra' drives worth of space is constant. Then again, the reliability decreases in 5/6 the more drives you add. For RAID 5, keep it under about 8 drives or so, and for RAID 6, keep it under about 12.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:25:00 No.17272979 Report

Quoted By:

>>17272946
>And what do you think will happen when one of the drives in the raid array fails?
If he's using RAID 1 or 5, the array will drop into a degraded state but nothing will be lost. That was his point.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:26:00 No.17272982 Report

Quoted By: >>17272998

>>17272918
It's only application is for hard drive failure which is fairly rare. If you accidentally delete data from one drive it occurrs on the other as well.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:27:00 No.17272998 Report

Quoted By:

>>17272982
Deletion can be undone, seeing as it only removes the file from the filesystem tree. If a drive absolutely shits itself, everything is gone short of sending it away to an incredibly expensive recovery company.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:28:00 No.17273005 Report

Quoted By: >>17273019 >>17273024

>>17272953
>How much data do you want to store?
Not much, probably less than 5TB overall.

>>17272946
You realize that RAID-1 and RAID-5 have redundant storage right? If one drive fails you should still have your data.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:30:00 No.17273019 Report

Quoted By: >>17273058

>>17273005
>Not much, probably less than 5TB overall.
Go with 4 x 2TB or 3 x 3TB drives in RAID-5, and make sure you use a quality PSU. If the data is really important such as work, back it up to external storage on top of that.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:30:00 No.17273024 Report

Quoted By: >>17273058

>>17273005
>less than 5TB
Either will probably be fine. RAID1 will cost you a bit more but will probably be a bit more reliable. RAID5 will cost you less but you forfeit a (probably negligible) amount of reliability.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:34:00 No.17273058 Report

Quoted By: >>17273075

>>17273019
>>17273024
Okay, thanks then. Any good guides on setting up a RAID? I've never really dealt with RAID myself, so I'm not really sure how everything works and what not.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:36:00 No.17273075 Report

Quoted By:

>>17273058
Depends on the OS. I'm guessing you're using this to store warez like the rest of /g/, so go with a reasonably large (256KB) stripe size.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:44:00 No.17273161 Report

Quoted By: >>17273185

Use RAID 6.
Double parity, so the array will tolerate two drive failures and still be usable.
Also, if a drive fails in a way that corrupts data, dual parity means the controller can work out which data is intact, and which is corrupted.
Mirrored storage will just duplicate the error, a good RAID 6 card will detect and discard the corrupted data and rebuild correctly.

Spend good money on a hardware card, and buy consumer drives that do TLER correctly.
Samsung HD204UI 2TB drives do quite well in an array from past tests.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:48:00 No.17273185 Report

Quoted By: >>17273215

>>17273161
>Spend good money on a hardware card,
For just storing porn or whatever OP's using it for, Linux software RAID should be adequate.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:51:00 No.17273215 Report

Quoted By:

>>17273185
Good point!
Just don't use a shitty SIL based card that costs $5 from ebay.
If you use Windows, use a good hardware based card.
If you use Linux, pick a good motherboard with enough ports.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:54:00 No.17273240 Report

Quoted By:

OP here. Thanks for all the help /g/, I was expecting far more trolling than I ended up getting. I'll be looking into everything you guys said and hopefully setting this up within a week or two!

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