Getting this Right...for the Last Time

The only thing that an internal RAID 1 or 5 array will protect you against is one hard drive failing. Any other "normal" happenings (corruption, virus, bad install, etc.) will cause the same problems as on a single drive.

TI can backup RAID arrays and can restore from RAID arrays (assuming the hardware is supported). If you setup an external RAID box, you can backup to that. Some commercial external hard drives come in RAID configurations now so it's easy to do.

 

mud crab - thanks and understand...i think i want both, at least here in the office. as any of us know who have had a drive fail, its never a simple matter to be back up and running. my thought with raid would be to have a hot swap drive ready for the failure while maintaining the TI backups for all of the things you mentioned. so far my only TI needs have been due to drive failures....but i won't count on that.

if you have raid experience do you have a "best configuarion" recommendation and do you think there are meaningful pro/con to having the raid internal to the computer vs in the external boxes you refer to?

 

I only have a little RAID experience and mostly through research. For best performance and compatibility reasons, an internal RAID is best for running OS's, programs, etc. Also Windows, for example, won't run from an external drive. If you're just storing data, then either internal or external would work, except the performance of the internal setup would probably be faster.

RAID 1 will use two drives with one being a "mirror" of the other. The speed should be on par with a single drive. RAID 5 uses at least three drives and you don't waste so much space since you can use about two-thirds for storage compared to only one-half on a RAID 1. RAID 5 speed on reads should be fast like RAID 0, but writes may be slower than a single drive due to parity information needing to be calculated and written.

There are several good RAID articles on the web if you want to do more research.