To Raid or not to Raid - Small Business Server

[slice]

I think the RAID support in Intel chipsets is SW raid. The SATA controller in the PCH can be configured to IDE, AHCI, or RAID.

If one of the drives fails, you should get an error message during POST when the RAID Option ROM runs.

If you have a RAID1 and a drive fails, you should be able to clone the volume and put it on a newly created RAID array with the larger drives.

This sounds about right. I think you are in good hands here Cain.

As stated above, you can look into RAID5, however, I believe it is not as reliable as RAID1

[The_Needle]

Unless you add a drive controller card that would be software which should really work just fine for what you need.

When a drive fails you will either get a pop up if the server is live or a post message at boot. either way its usually not a big deal unless the corruption is written to the mirrored drive. That's why I prefer raid 5.

[Cain]

Thx... Explain RAID 5 to me and contrast it with RAID 1 ??

[goldenfooler]

oh your going to hurt my brain trying to keep up with you Cain.
I am learning a little though.

[slice]

Thx... Explain RAID 5 to me and contrast it with RAID 1 ??

This should help

RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 Explained with Diagrams

[Quamin]

Thx... Explain RAID 5 to me and contrast it with RAID 1 ??

Capacity
Raid 0 = 2TB (capacity = total of all drives, minimum 2)
Raid 1 = 2x 500GB (2:1 ratio, minimum 2 per set)
Raid 10 = 1TB (2:1 ratio, minimum 4)
Raid 5 = 1.5TB (capacity = total of all drives minus 1, minimum 3)

Redundancy (NOT BACK UP)
Raid 0 = NONE
Raid 1 = Single Drive Failure per mirrored set
Raid 10 = Single Drive Failure per mirrored set
Raid 5 = Single Drive Failure

Performance
Raid 0 = Fastest, performance increases with drive count
Raid 1 = Possible boost in speed for READ, no gain to possible loss (if noticeable) elsewhere
Raid 10 = Similar performance to its equivalent drive Raid 0 (ie 3 Drive Raid0=6 drive Raid 10)
Raid 5 = Between Raid 0 and single drive performance, goes up with drive count. processor intensive

[goldenfooler]

Ok so I am looking at this from a very amature point of view.
It seems that with Raid 5 you can still lose a part of what you have as there are no seperate mirrors... or are they saving on all 3 disks the same?

[Quamin]

Ok so I am looking at this from a very amature point of view.
It seems that with Raid 5 you can still lose a part of what you have as there are no seperate mirrors... or are they saving on all 3 disks the same?

Well there are no separate mirrors in RAID 5, but it can remain running and construct the data until you replace the drive. It is also most cost efficient of the RAID redundancy solutions. You do not lose anything unless another drive fails, but you better get another drive in there fast! If more than one drive fails (catastrophic failure), and thus your redundancy fails, you better have had a backup strategy in place such as Tape drives or other storage mediums to restore from.

[goldenfooler]

I guess for the efficenency Raid 5 would be better, but you would have to be watching it all the time. This looks to my eye to be better for large corporations with tech people to watch everything. Am I right.

[Quamin]

Heh, well I'd say RAID 10 is for larger entities as the cost is huge, and you don't have to watch them (RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10) all the time if you back up once in a while.
That way if a drive fails without you noticing every now and then (there's a reason there are administrators or "the owner" to do maintenance) you can recover from another source and be up and running in much less time than if you lost everything. Storage tech is its own specialized field and there's pros and cons to each path you take

If you wanted to skip redundancy, having more guaranteed up-time, and wanted the most performance, you could just go RAID 0 with a scheduled backup image on some external drive/source so if a drive fails you just buy new hardware later and restore from the backup. You may just be down for a few days

[The_Needle]

Yeah, it really all depends on how sure are you of your backup and how long would you be willing to be down for repairs.

[Cain]

Question....

for my server, I will have one drive c:\ with only my OS...

Can't I either, copy the entire contents of my c drive onto a flash drive, then if my disc crashes, copy the contents of my flash drive onto a new HD, or backup the contents of my OS drive onto a flash drive then reload a nee drive if my main disc fails??

Is it really necessary to purchase some type of ghost software for my purposes??

Thx !!

[Quamin]

Question....

for my server, I will have one drive c:\ with only my OS...

Can't I either, copy the entire contents of my c drive onto a flash drive, then if my disc crashes, copy the contents of my flash drive onto a new HD, or backup the contents of my OS drive onto a flash drive then reload a nee drive if my main disc fails??

Is it really necessary to purchase some type of ghost software for my purposes??

Thx !!

Depends on your OS. Some of the newer Windows OS' have multiple partitions, otherwise I'd say try using something like "xcopy /e /v /o /c /h C: X:" where X: is the the flash drive. I'm sure there are also open source backup solutions for throwing the OS onto another source.

[Quamin]

I looked up a couple of the free/open source backup software packages, so perhaps you can give them a try?
Areca Backup - Official Website
http://www.clonezilla.org/

[Cain]

Aha !! Thanks!! I'll check those out...



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