New hard drive time

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John,
It is probably too late but I'd like to add few words.

1. Buy two different brands - so if one will fail due to some technical problems, other will be still OK. That is a case for all of my servers.
We had some problems with brand X(no need to name it) and firmware. In really rare situation, disk would report as failed to raid controller despite being OK! Imagine having 3 disks and all of them (or just 2) reporting FAIL!

2. Samsung is not a best buy. Yes, they're cheap and possibly fast but that doesn't really matter if you need drive which will last for some time.

3. RAID will protect from disk failure but NOT from filesystem failure.
I would advise EXTERNAL NAS box/USB drive as a backup solution.
That means as well that you can access your files from any computer in your home.

4. Don't really listen to Dragon's advice. Utter rubbish.

Hope that helps!
Cheers
Chris
 
ive got a 500gb as my xp hd

ive got a 500gb internal for my photos & music

ive got a 750gb internal for my bit torrents

and a 500gb external for back up of music 7 photos

all 3 internals are samsung 7200 sata 2 and lovly

external is ide

better to have many drives as they will not all die at once, if you have a 1tb drive with everything on and it goes you will cry
 
We are having a committee meeting regarding external backing up and what to do :eek: tis a to do

Dragon is dragon;)

Regards
John
 
ive got a 500gb as my xp hd

ive got a 500gb internal for my photos & music

ive got a 750gb internal for my bit torrents

and a 500gb external for back up of music 7 photos

all 3 internals are samsung 7200 sata 2 and lovly

external is ide

better to have many drives as they will not all die at once, if you have a 1tb drive with everything on and it goes you will cry
Me thinks someone is not reading my post or I have as usual failed to make myself clear? :eek: :eek: :eek:

I have gone for two (2) 1 Tb drives which wil be RAID.

We are discussing other back-up options :)

Regards
John
 
Well,

In my humble opinion RAID1 (mirror) makes only sense with 2 different drives for reasons I've explained in one of my prev posts. I hope that some more experienced admins will agree with me ;)

I would suggest also to read from time to tiem SMART data from disks. Sometimes SMART will report problems before it is too late!

Hope that helps!
Cheers
Chris
 
Impressive home set up - I'm showing my lack of computer savvy here, but we just back all our documents up every week onto an external hd and thats it.

I've had 3 pc failures in 10 years on the 4 office pcs and in every instance we just bought a new one and uploaded the backup and were up and running again within 1/2 day having lost couple of days emails (we don't produce huge amounts of data on a daily basis).

Technology marches on, doesn't seem that long ago since I was using Macs with 1.2 GB hard drives (late 90's - I've still to fill a hard drive). 2x1TB drives - thats an awful lot of 1s and 0s :)

Ade
 
Hi Chris,
This is very much a question and is thrown up in the air in the hope it collects some advice.

I thought to use RAID I had to have at least TWO identical hard drives and those hard drives had to be identical in every way?

I would guess that for a home user like me, backing up a hard drive once a week would be okay, but....... The only luck I have is no luck, the only ships are hardships and sod's law would dictate I would take a brilliant photograph, download it, switch off the computer without backing anything up and...................... bang!

To overcome my laziness I intend using RAID.

I have always had at least two hard drives and each drive would be partitioned into smaller drives and when I remember, I back up important files onto a completely different hard drive, but my memory is terrible and now that I am getting a nice collection of pictures, then the cost of a hard drive is negligble.

Yes a 1 Tb hard drive is excessive and yes it will take a lot of data to fill it up, but far better to have too much space than too little. Each picture I take is approximqtely 15mb(just checked 15.9mb ;)) and yes I have an awful lot of pictures. I enjoy playing computer simulation type gamers and these things remain on my computer for an age.

I think the first computer I had was a 80mb 486DX but I might be wrong about the size.

The funny thing is I am still using a piece of software that came with Windows 3.1. It's my phone directory and I'm amazed it is still compatible. Great feature and well worth keeping (card.exe)

Regards
John
 
Well,

In my humble opinion RAID1 (mirror) makes only sense with 2 different drives for reasons I've explained in one of my prev posts. I hope that some more experienced admins will agree with me ;)

I'll agree - on a customer and unit trust managemnt system back in 2000, new raid cabinets, multiple identical brand X drives, about half of them failed within 3 months of each other. 2 within one week.
 
Hi John,

First of all some calculations:

1 TB = [SIZE=-1]1048576 megabytes (M or MB) which means you can store around 66000 pictures i high quality. Of course, you have other data as well so it would be less than 66000 but there you have an idea. I guess pictures are in RAW format. Further processing will create some copies etc.

Now, for RAIDs you should consider same size drives, but different manufactures. They don't even have to be same size, but that would make your life easier :) You can create different arrays.

Backup. To be honest it is a whole new story. It doesn't really matter if you are home user or business. What matters is how much data and how often you create, what kind of data you create and how critical that data is. There are few other factors but those ones would be most important in your situation.
For example- you have installation media for your operating system, games, other software- which means that you don't really have to do full backup.

It is not a big deal if O/S is lost - it can be quickly reinstalled.

If a picture is lost - usually it can't be recovered without an backup.

Now, with most backups problem is a speed. I would suggest in your situation to do more frequent backups rather than one big backup.

have a look:

To transfer 512GB (50%) of your disk) it would take around 13 hours over 100mb network! (as I've said, AROUND) And 100mb network is still most common network in businesses/households :)
That is a network connecting your PCs.

Would you consider to reduce size of your images and store them online? I'm talking about JPG/other compressed formats which would allow you to have cheap online storage... It could be even free! GMAIL is offering now around 8GB of space which can easly be used with PICASA! I would suggest PICASA as it is fairly easy to use and can do backups automatically :)

There are other services like http://www.getdropbox.com/ (see video why that might be helpful, it cost $99/year for 50Gb or it's free if you need just 2GB)
If you need more than that- http://www.filedropper.com/ seems to be good and cheap solution. $99 for 250GB if I'm right.

Ofcourse, there are milions of other solutions and maybe people could recommend something else if needed?

One more thing. You have not partiotioned your drive into smaller drives. That is a common mistake but really dangerus.
Yes, you have different drive letters - but they are only PARTYTIONS! So if dik is dead most likely partitiins would be in state which would be impossible/very hard to recover the data. Yes, it is some kind of protection against file system corrucption but it will not protect against hardware failure.

Uff, that's it for now.
Any questions, please let me know!

Cheers
Chris
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If you've got the cash why not spash out on one of these...

http://www.overclock.co.uk/product/OCZ-64GB-2.5inch-SATA-II-MLC-SSD-Solid-State-Hard-Drive_8166.html

We've got some at the office and they're superb.

Uber quiet PCs. It's sheer bliss!

PS. We've had quite a few SCSI Maxtor failures - Seagate or WD are reliable.

64Gb vs 1Tb (or 2Tb if striped) - not really a match - however, Solid States drives are the future....

John,

Go with RAID 1 Mirror if you need the safety of your data... or RAid 0 if you need speed - however, personally I would (and do) avoid RAID 0.

As a backup solution have a look on ebay and get yourself a half decent DLT/Ultrium tape drive and run some backups when you need. Its a case of 'peace of mind'.

If budget is not an issue then there are many solutions available - I personally do not use offsite backup services, as I like to keep my data personal and to myself - ie not upload onto other peoples servers.... 'assuming' that it actually is fully fault tolerant and backed up.

I have had two Lacie Extreme 1TB drives die on me, 1 lacie powersupply, and 1 WD RE2 500GB sata which was RAID 0. So am a little paranoid about backups. I currently have 13TB of personal storage - and I am sure there is some duplicate data on there.

Just my $0.02.
 
Sorry guys but I have to disagree with raid 0. That is the worst idea ever in terms of RAIDs and i can't really see use for it. If ONE disk fails, data is lost on both of them.

So chances of loosing data are twice as much as having only one disk.

Cheers
Chris
 
I have had two Lacie Extreme 1TB drives die on me, 1 lacie powersupply, and 1 WD RE2 500GB sata which was RAID 0.
I had a Lacie 500GB drive die on me a few months ago, it was barely a year old. Not happy but lesson learned: avoid Lacie.
 
J
1. Buy two different brands -

I wouldn't. Yes I understand your logic. But you are also introducing another equipment variation into the mix.

2. Samsung is not a best buy. Yes, they're cheap and possibly fast but that doesn't really matter if you need drive which will last for some time.

There is hardly any difference in any of the mainstream drives out there unless you have a specific workload that you can benchmark you'll never really know.

My inclination is simply to go with price, quietness, power consumption, and then buffer size - in that order.

3. RAID will protect from disk failure but NOT from filesystem failure.
I would advise EXTERNAL NAS box/USB drive as a backup solution.
That means as well that you can access your files from any computer in your home.

Yes. Have seen Windows goose a NTFS file system a few times.
 
Sorry guys but I have to disagree with raid 0. That is the worst idea ever in terms of RAIDs and i can't really see use for it. If ONE disk fails, data is lost on both of them.

I have never ever encountered anybody using RAID 0 except by accident (Doh!).
 
I'm told the random write speed is very poor????:eek:

I have also been told all about RAID (I think)

Flash drives are unproven in operational environments at the moment. Their time is coming. However I would rather let others suffer the bleeding edge of technology on this.
 
And that's the idea!

Yes.

But it's another type of component. And that introduces a separate risk that there will be some sort of configuration issue. That risk may be low but it's additional. OTOH if there is a problem with the drives it is likely to be early expiry - it's unlikely both would expire simultaneously.
 

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