Raid?

S

super_plus

Active member
A few months back I lost a pretty critical hard drive with no back up...ever since I've been fanatical about backing everything up. Now the cost of external hard drives is starting to catch up with me. I've been trying to figure out a more efficient way of storing/backing up my data and thought a raid system might be the answer.
I'm on a pretty lean budget so I've been leaning towards this
Could somebody explain the different raid numbers? I believe the G-Raid is a raid0 and by my understanding if one hard drive fails on a raid 0 you lose all your data. I thought idea behind a raid was to have multiple copies of your data in case of failure, maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Clarification and suggestions would be helpful.
 
Raid 0 is designed for performance not reliability... you're right lose one raid 0 drive and you've lost everything.

Raid 1 is two drives mirrored. Lose one and the other keeps you going.

Raid 5 requires at least 3 drives and is as safe as raid 1 but you get a little more space than raid 1... That is in raid 1 you get half the space you buy... 2 x 500 gb drives give you 500gb. In raid5 3x 500gb drives give you more than half of the drives you bought that is space > 750GB.... maybe around 1TB.

Sadly none of these is a good substitute for a good backup. They help recover from hardware failure that you experienced before, but not from other issues such as virus infections, inadvertent deletion, etc. Say you have raid1 and get a nasty virus, both drives are infected.

You should be able to back up without buying drive after drive. There are a number of programs out there that do incremental backups. I use and like "Backup for Workgroups" It uses space very well and you shouldn't have to continue buying drives unless you are just pumping in tons of data (which can happen in video... but in which case raid wouldn't help either).
 
Thanks for the help. I'm running a Mac so I'm not too worried about viruses. Human error and mechanical failure are what get me. I would be interested to find good backup software for mac, doing it manually is becoming a little tedious but I trust it more than a program. I think I may just invest in a hard drive dock. You can get them on Newegg in combo deal practically for free, alot cheeper than buying a whole external drive just for back up.
 
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