Having successfully installed my 250GB SSD as drive C and the 150GB HDD as drive E, the computer (Dell Optiplex 780 currently running W7 but not for long, I hope) asks me if I want to configure the discs in a RAID configuration.
I wasn't sure what that was, but reading a bit about it I'm wondering if there are in fact any advantages for me and whether it's worth the bother. I get the impression that having the HDD alongside the SSD will merely slow up the latter with no great benefit. I don't do gaming, and I seldom use my computer for anything other than Internet browsing and email, have two AV programs running and do regular back-ups.
Probably not, but if they were both of normal type, then yes as long as they wre hot replaceable. Of course all raid really is is a back up which runs all the time. I'm not sure if you can specify that the ssd is your working drive and the other only becomes so if the former fails and all the synchronisation is quite low on resources, that would very much depend on the hardware. All I can say is that in a sample of 11 I am not impressed by the reliability of SSDs. I had to replace mine which was new in 2015. It just failed to boot one day and as it was an on board chip type made by Samsung, nobody could look at it properly to see if it was just corrupted, but all the tools provided failed to fix it. I now have one mounted like a conventional drive and am paranoid about back ups. Only this morning a test of the registry showed a checksum issue, which hopefully was corrected, but it kind of makes you wonder if they are as reliable as they say they are. Brian
Probably not useful unless you have very exacting requirements for either speed or continuous data availability.
Back when a big SSD was expensive and spinning rust cheap there was a pseudo-RAID configuration that Intel offered on some chipsets where there was an ISTR 32GB SSD cache fronting the most recently used data off the big disk. But if you have enough space on the SSD already then it gains you nothing.
If the PC is on a UPS and you can be sure no-one will ever pull the plug you can enable more aggressive caching on the SSD to go faster (but if you ever do pull the plug out then data loss is almost inevitable). Default behaviour is relatively safe.
The only other RAID configuration that can be useful is if you want blisteringly fast random access and don't care about reliability. A RAID0 pair of matched SSDs runs about as fast as it is possible to get on most PCs and if you are using it as scratch workspace for very large files and accept the doubled risk of data loss it can be useful. (it really isn't suitable for a system disk)
All the other RAID configurations give you higher availability and a way to recover if just one drive goes bad. Even I'd recommend a matched set of drives in a RAID array if you want optimum performance.
It offers no protection at all if you get a ransomeware infection.
Worth having an offline backup. 256GB USB thumbnail drives are affordable. You might get away with 128GB ones. You should have backups of some sort for any data you value. Ransomware is getting dangerous.
I wouldn't bother with a striped array. It doubles your chance of failure.
OTOH, I do have a RAID1 setup, and it's proved very helpful when a disc has failed. So far, I haven't had a SSD fail. Given that a 250GB SSD only costs £25, I'd suggest buying one and putting it in RAID1 setup. The HDD can be kept separate for extra storage space. That's assuming the machine will take more than two drives.
I agree with the posts above. I went through this debate myself a number of years ago. Decision is essentially whether you want high availability (i.e. still works if a drive fails) vs proper backup (i.e. even if you have accidentally deleted a file or overwritten it you can go back to a previous version of the file and restore it). My view was that the data/ system being out of action for a day or so whilst I restore it from a backup is not much of an issue compared to the benefits of a proper backup.
So my solution is to use CrashPlan. I back up my main drive to another one locally and to their cloud. This way, if the primary fails (or I need to restore a particular version of a file) I can quickly restore it from the local backup. If the whole lot goes (e.g. a fire) I can then restore from their cloud (all encrypted).
I have had a primary disk failure once since I set this up. Bought a new disk and the restoration (around 2 Tb) took a few hours from the local backup.
Most people recommend against hardware RAID because the disk formats are sometimes proprietary, which means you can't just move your drive to another system to recover the data.
A long time ago, hardware raid had a speed advantage, but I don't think that's been the case for at least a decade.
There are many RAID levels - 0, 1, 5, 6 etc.
They are very different. Some like RAID 0 (striping) don't offer any redundancy at all and actually increase the chance of failure.
RAID 1 (mirroring) is probably the simplest for home use. That's what I use on my QNAP NAS
I have just come across this whilst playing with Open Media Vault (Free Linux based NAS software) on a couple of slimline Shuttle PC's.
I set up my daughters with a 30Gb SSD (the Shuttle came with s/h) for the system drive, located in the optical drive area and a 2TB Tosh laptop drive in the std hdd space.
A plugin allows for an automatic backup or Sync when you attach an external / USB drive.
On hers I seemed to need to set the (2TB) USB drive up with a EXT4 format, meaning she'd have to boot into Linux (her main PC is dual boot, Linux / Windows) to be able to read the backup drive.
I've just built a duplicate NAS for myself, left the backup drive as NTFS and it appears to have backed up to that with no issue, meaning I can read it in any Windows PC (more common round here etc).
I also have a Synology DS119j that only has a single (4TB, red) drive that I might use as my main NAS and run a backup to the OMV.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of difference in performance between the two devices, except the Shuttle uses less power (about 10W active). ;-)
I put std laptop drives in the OMV NAS's as they aren't going to be run hard and spindown the drives when not in use.
I intend to try some software RAID5 on a PC based OMV NAS I hope to build soon (mostly for the S&G's).
We have a number of computers (with 3 kids, myself and my wife, we'd be fighting over them otherwise). That means that each PC is not that important, as we can do without any one of them for a bit. The files (particularly irreplaceable ones like photos and video) are what matters. We therefore have a UPS protected home server that stores everything on a RAID 6 array (with battery backed cache on the card too), running a version of Linux. Deleted or superseded files are maintained, with only the oldest being overwritten as space is required and the current files on there (and the system setup) are backed up externally.
The server is far less likely to fail than a consumer grade PC that keeps having all sorts of software added and deleted as well, but if it does, the PCs can be up and running just by turning DHCP back on in the router instead of the server and relying upon local storage until the server can be got back up and running and the files can be restored.
Individual files can be recovered from the backups before the server is restored if something is urgently required (restoring all of a backup takes days as it is done using a Raspberry Pi as a file backup server).
Additionally, having a home server also means that as we change ISPs, pointing it at the new ISP and updating our domain details lets everything carry on as before (complete with all our old emails); our streaming music and video players can run from it; it provides our own cloud services and webserver and a whole lot more.
Which I why I have a complete spare server stored away for our home network. However I also have a spare PCIe version of the same RAID card that will go into any old PC as well.
It still has other advantages though. When I first set up our system, I set it up as a RAID 1 array for testing and it then replaced our previous system. Later I bought more disks and changed to a RAID 6 array on the fly. During the change (before I had a UPS), we had a powercut in the night. The battery backed RAID card simply continued where it had left off when power was restored - saving me re-installing and re-loading the system and then restoring a backup (which would have taken a couple of days).
RAID 6 on ours to maximise array capacity, but still withstand two disk failures.
If you have a 4 disk NAS then raid 10 (basically striping and mirroring combined) becomes quite handy for redundancy and extra performance.
Also worth noting that Win 10 supports "Storage spaces". A facility that will let you aggregate multiple drives together, and adjust the tuning to get the right combination of speed, redundancy, and total capacity for the job in hand.
I wonder if that is in any way linked to the 'Drive Extender' feature found on WHS V1 John?
Join any combination of drives across many interfaces to form one shared space but be able to stipulate which shared folders are duplicated across drives?
I run two synology NAS boxes with RAID on both. The first get file history backups every ten minutes and the second the Synology hyper backup from the first every night.
They are in different buildings and both on UPS.
I also automatically store encrypted versions on one drive as I have 5Tb to play with.
That was a very good feature when I was using it as a home server, sadly missing from the later version, although a couple of third-party add-ons were available.
I think that dropping that feature had a major effect on the take up of the later version.
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