Una. Given what you’ve said, I think RAID 1 would work fine for you. This gives you a mirrored drive in case one goes bad. If you want to improve on that, put a large NAS or file storage system in place to bounce backups to. It doesn’t sound like you’re working on system critical operations at home (like huge CAD or music studio files where a failure in the middle of a project would cost you hours of productive time).
I would keep your hardware simple and your backup routines complex.
In my set up at home I don’t bother with RAID in the local systems. I have 1T of storage in a small NAS device (broken across two 500g drives). I have a redundant back up routine in place. Files are sent to the different drives in the NAS and back again to my main workstation. I have several 100g drives in removable bays. These drives are used for long term storage and rarely have power applied to them.
I have a large amount of files created in the music studio. I have a copy on my workstation, and copies on the removable drives. If my workstation drive pukes, I have a back up. If one of my removable drives fail, I have a copy on another as well as my workstation. I have also made copies of my very important files to DVD.
I do not have a backup routine in place for the OS - only important files. If the OS drive in my workstation fails, I replace and reload. To me that is the least of my worries.
A proper RAID 5 array is pretty sweet. 4-5 drives in an array. Keep one as a spare. If one drive in the array fails you reboot, take the failed drive out of the array, put the spare in its place, and rebuild the array. Later you can yank the dead drive and replace with the new spare. My work runs differently than black rabbit’s. When a drive fails we don’t restore from backup. We take the dead drive from the array, replace with the spare, and let it continue on as if nothing happened. No need to rebuild anything or do a bare metal restore.
The problem with this is the cost. You need a good RAID controller (and yes they cost alot because they have a CPU and memory on board. Think of them as little, yet complete, motherboards). There are also drives rated to be run 24/7. These will cost you more as well - but they last longer than regular consumer drives.
I work with servers that need to run 24/7 and have zero downtime. In this case it makes sense to run a high-end RAID card and nice drives. At home I can afford downtime. Myself I don’t think the cost is worth it.
Una, I was going to suggest this before I’d even finished your OP, but with your knowledge base of all things PC, I figured it’d send you off the deep end.
My example is kind of extreme. We don’t really swap out the whole I/O subsystem every time a random drive fails - but our attitude is pretty close. If we see a disk throwing parity errors - not failures, mind you, just hiccups - we’ve got a two-hour nationwide on-site dispatch to replace that drive. If the tech replaces a disk and we still see errors, the RAID card, cables, and backplane all get swapped. If we still see the errors, the tech does a serial in-place replace/rebuild of every disk in the array. If it still burps, we start talking about replacement system boards and bare-metal restores.
That’s all for a situation with no downtime - we’re proactively covering our asses. If the server’s actually down, the whole process is accelerated, plus we start screaming at the hardware people at our vendor while insisting that they manually parse the hex dumps of the RAM, swap, and all the relevant controller caches.
Now for home use, you definitely don’t need to be that paranoid. Just remember two things:
RAID doesn’t mean never having to worry about a drive failure - it means having to worry about two drive failures, and possibly a controller failure
RAID is absolutely no substitute for good backups
Forget rule #2, and the Storage Gods will see to it that at least two of the disks in your RAID-5 were manufactured on a Friday.
Thanks guys. I need to think hard about what to do next. I’m thinking is there anything I can do with my sunk cost, and how much more do I want to beat my head against this.
Working long and hard, I’ve got a machine running that seems OK in all things, but no RAID. Based on some of the advice in this thread about not continuing with the RAID onboard, and the cost of the RAID cards, I’m considering an El Cheapo option of just using extra hard drives (like 0.5-0.75TB or something) and swapping them in and out with a removable tray, and using Ghost or the equivalent to copy the active data drives to the removable ones every now and then. Since I sit down to work on weekends, if I do a once a weekend backup I can likely be OK. In theory I could then put the backup in a fire safe for added protection. Any thoughts on that plan? Good, bad, or ugly?
I guess it’s a similar thing, except I can keep the drive tray locked in a fire safe most of the time. I have a 250GB external drive for backups and things, but it’s slooooooooooooow. Of course I could buy an external drive with SATA interface (since the motherboards do not support eSATA built-in), but…I don’t know. There are many paths to take, and I don’t know which is best.
Right. Removable trays are gateways to data corruption, if you use the cheap ass trays. Better to use a USB or firewire external enclosure. Or an external SATA drive, if you have an external SATA hookup.
And why not just use the Backup program that comes with windows? It’s not horrid, and Ghost is, these days.
Edit: We’re getting closer to a solution, I think.
Okay! So…
Decisions to make:
A: NAS or external SATA or firewire or USB 2.0 drive?
B: Method of backup: Ghost? (NO!) Windows Backup? Some other solution? (Acronis is good. Ghost is very bad post 2003)
I don’t want to hijack this thread too much, but would you mind expanding on this? I’ve been using swappable trays both at home and the office for 2 years and I’ve never experienced any problems. Previously, I was using external usb harddrives but eventually switched to removable trays because I found the external drives bulky and slow.
Another request for more details, here. I mostly use Syncback freeware for data backups but I occasionally use Ghost 2003 to make full drive images. What’s the problem with later versions of Ghost? Somebody told me once that they make changes to the boot sector?
Cheap trays sometimes have, ah, signal interruption at bad times, which leads to data corruption. Now, if you’re using trays designed to be hot swappable, it shouldn’t be a problem, or if you’re removing them only when the computer is actually off, again, shouldn’t be a problem, but sometimes the cheaper ones have bad things happen at the connectors.
Basically, since '03, they changed (consumer grade) Ghost so what you got was no longer Ghost, but is now PowerQuest’s DriveImage. It can theoretically clone a currently running computer. And it does so some of the time. The problem is, the version 9 ghost and later is, in my experience, worse at dealing with ‘I just want the effing thing to copy this drive I hauled out of this toasty machine’ than the version 8 (03) model.
Just to recap, you have mobo’s & kit for two good pc’s, plus a stack of hard disks beside? If that’s correct then I’d strongly recommend building the computers as standard desktop systems, and then using the extra disks for network attached storage.
The cheapest option I could think of would be to chuck any existing disks you have left over into cheap USB housings, and then pick up one of these:
It’s a very cheap and simple device for connecting any USB drive to the network. Then you can just setup automated backup jobs to run to the mapped network drive. For redundancy, you just rotate which drive you back up to on a regular basis. If you’ve got 4 spare drives from the original systems, you could run a simple rotation on a weekly basis, and thus have a months worth of rollback points.
If you’d like something a bit more automatic, then you could go for a more expensive casing with a build in RAID controller. There’s a huge range of these, from the hideously expensive to the very reasonable, but a lot depends on what disks you’ve got to hand.
Oh, for shits and giggles it’s worth noting that most of the lower end NAS boxes are running a low power processor and linux. I tweaked my one to run as a media jukebox, so now I can stream all my music/movies across my home network too.
Just get yourself a low-end hardware RAID card. I’ve got a 3Ware 9550 in this machine and it works just fine.Yes, it’s not cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than your time and effort and annoance.
As it stands, I’m selling many of the components. I thought about it somewhat and I’m just tired and worn out. I am considering a RAID card, but I need to wait until the budget opens up again for spending more money.
Former home-PC-builder here. About two years ago, the value of the intellectual craftsman challenge slipped below the line of valued time. Far too many weekends wasted of hunting down and finding that weasely driver that refused to work, troubleshooting, formatting, etc. Without fail it was either Windows refusing to recognize hardware or certified drivers properly, or manufacturers that can’t write functioning drivers for their own damn products.
To me, it is now akin to doing constant remodels and work on a termite-infested house using scrap Home Depot materials. Why torture yourself?
I gave up on RAID arrays at home a while ago. These days, I wait until someone chucks out a reasonably good machine and I wipe it, install a couple big hard drives and run FreeNAS on it. I back things up to the NAS server regularly.
OTOH, I scooped up a Terastation several months back for the office. About a dozen people back up their hard drives regularly to it and it works fantastically. Pretty cheap, too.
Wow … what a nightmare. Sorry to hear about this, Una. I’ve been through it myself, although I haven’t attempted RAID-5. I always buy Asus, and share the sentiment towards Gigabyte’s products as “shambling atrocities”, having had a first-and-last time RAID experience with them in the past. Even my current Asus RAID-0 setup has an occasional twitch in it from time to time … not the array itself but the other standard IDE drives on the other controllers. I have one older non-arrayed Parallel-ATA IDE drive that will spontaneously disappear from POST and not show up in BIOS if the computer shuts down prematurely. I also have other non-arrayed Serial-ATA drives in my system, which never do this. The day is coming where I’m gonna swap that PATA out with a new SATA drive and be fully rid of all those clunky wide connectors, and the stupid “disappearing drive” Asus BIOS problem.
This doesn’t really relate to the problem, but I’m just offering that you’re not alone with drive configuration problems on an Asus board, Una. I don’t trust many other board manufacturers. I’ve learned over the years to trust Asus quality but even I have to wonder if my faith is misplaced when I see the lack of qualified driver updates or even a comprehensive (or comprehendible) American support website from them. There comes a time, like others have said, that the return on investment of your DIY “fun time” becomes anything but fun. Probably about a half hour, like Stranger said. I think maybe you got a bit consumed with the idea of building fault tolerance into each computer. I don’t use raid for mirroring, just striping my system drive for better performance, and yes, I do notice the performance boost when striped even if it isn’t an idealistic 200% increase. All my critical data is stored on non-RAID drives and backed up as needed. For what you’re trying to pull off, I can’t help but wonder why you didn’t purchase something prepackaged like an NAS box. I won’t argue Apple vs. Wintel because Apple does make good, reliable workstations, albeit for a ridiculous price. I suppose you get what you pay for, but I don’t think you’d be looking to spend thousands for this kind of setup on a Mac.
Still, the new Mac Pro workstation got me all starry-eyed when I first saw it just a few days ago. Dual Quad-core Intel Xeons + 16GB DDR2 + 3TB storage = Holy Moses. That thing will hit five digits and rival the cost of a small car before it’s even fully maxed out to the point of overkill. It is literally a home-based HD video production studio. Ridiculous, yes, but what a machine. Each new Apple product is closing the gap in terms of build quality, system layout, expandability, and more mainstream componentry. Even the insides of the Mac Pro are a thing of beauty … the physical drive setup on the Mac Pro is wonderfully simple. Okay, enough. This is like falling in love with a supermodel I’ll never have a chance with.
I think the point of my slight hijack is: where are the PC manufacturers when it comes to putting this level of power and reliability on a DIY board? I’ve no doubt there are PC users who’d pay a premium for this kind of motherboard. The best performance chipset we have now is the nVidia 680i, I think. I’d be satisfied to upgrade to that, but I’m still not sure it matches the performance potential (much less, ease of use) in this new Apple flagship.
I’m a little glad that I’m not the only one, even though it’s unfortunate that others must suffer.
I guess I built myself very, very early on (like, in the Reagan Administration) for the hobbyist aspect. OK, maybe it was the “empowering” aspect - you know, understanding what your computer is, how it goes together, so it’s not a black box. And I thought I did understand everything, except the CPU (and then in grad school, I understood the CPU, and wished I didn’t…) Nowadays, I built it myself primarily to get exactly what I wanted, and in the hopes that it might be fun on the side.
FreeNAS is a pretty good idea. Got a junkbox to run it on?
Aw, Una, it’s fun, you’re just trying to do sommat that isn’t worthwhile to do at your budget. There’s still the software RAID, which doesn’t work too badly, either. Actually, I hear the performance on it is pretty good.
C’mon, I just finished putting together my new box two weeks ago. It was nice and easy and worthwhile. Cheer up, we’re here for you. And trust me, we know exactly how you feel.
Just like I did when I realized my socket 745 motherboard which was effing GORGEOUS supported Core Duo… but not Core 2 Duo. And I had to get a replacement. Ow.
