To Raid or not to Raid - Small Business Server

[DougBob]

Ok straight up Cain. The guys are right on the OS. No need!
Hopefully you have data on another drive.

The main thing is rate the damage if lost, how much you can afford to lose and the cost to meet you need and go from there.

As far as the RAID level, theres only 3 types of RAIDs, forget the others: RAID 0, 1 and 5. For you redundancy, RAID 0 is out! So that leaves you with RAID 1(Mirroring) or RAID 5. I recommend you use RAID 1.

Also keep in mind, RAID is only good for a single drive failure not catastrophic events, i.e. fire.
You really need to implement a full disaster recovery plan to include maintaining off site backup storage. Figure up what backup media (tape, DVD, external drives, etc) method is economically in your funds and implement. I recommend full weekly backups of data and incremental daily backups. You may want to also include a monthly or quarterly imaging of your server. This is optional but could be handy.

[Dead...Again]

And in DOS most of the better games required the use of a boot disc to use all of the available memory.
Apache

Oh, yeah, that was a total pain trying to set up your memory if you needed to use more than just the base 640KB!

[Cain]

Ok straight up Cain. The guys are right on the OS. No need!
Hopefully you have data on another drive.

The main thing is rate the damage if lost, how much you can afford to lose and the cost to meet you need and go from there.

As far as the RAID level, theres only 3 types of RAIDs, forget the others: RAID 0, 1 and 5. For you redundancy, RAID 0 is out! So that leaves you with RAID 1(Mirroring) or RAID 5. I recommend you use RAID 1.

Also keep in mind, RAID is only good for a single drive failure not catastrophic events, i.e. fire.
You really need to implement a full disaster recovery plan to include maintaining off site backup storage. Figure up what backup media (tape, DVD, external drives, etc) method is economically in your funds and implement. I recommend full weekly backups of data and incremental daily backups. You may want to also include a monthly or quarterly imaging of your server. This is optional but could be handy.

Thx Doug.... My Plan now is to keep just my OS on my C Drive, then do some type of image of my C drive to redo it if it crashes...

I will be copying, mirroring and backing up in the cloud my data drives, so I'm good there.

My question is do I really need RAID only for my OS drive?? There seem to be 10 ways to restore that sucker pretty quickly.

[Dead...Again]

I wouldn't worry about doing RAID on your OS drive. Just get a small fast drive.

[Cain]

http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/20...video-edition/

[mapes]

Cain, if this is for business purposes, yes, you need at least a RAID1 setup. Depending on what you are doing, redundant multiple drives (I'm talking at least 4) should be highly considered.

Obviously, it would be nice to have a hardware RAID controller, but if you don't, or do not want to invest that much into a RAID setup, just use the built in software type RAID that most motherboards support.

This thread is kinda old and long but, I'll put my .02 cents in. Slice is right in one respect. A dedicated HW raid controller is preferred in some cases. All mobo based raid is called AFRAID by folks in the storage industry. Which stands for A Fake RAID. Meaning the raid operations are not off loaded onto a dedicated controller. Depending on the type of and how large of a raid your doing your going to take a processor hit. As all of the MB raid uses the CPU to do all of it's operations. This may or may not be a big deal. Just something to keep in mind