Raid 1 Question.

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Oldbenwa

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Dec 22, 2003
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My boss has this idea in his head that he wants to take home a drive, with all our data (~130gb) on it, every day when he leaves work. Would raid 1 accomplish this? Would it have to rebuild the mirror the next day when he brings it back in?

Thanks!

Edit: Tentative Server specs:

Dell Poweredge 2900
Perc5/i SAS Controller
2x300gb drives Raid 1 - Data
2x36gb Raid 1 - O/S

 
Why in the world would he want to do this?

But to answer your question it really should not be an issue. It most likely will want to rebuild each morning. This puts your data at risk since during this process you do not have the security of RAID1.

If he is doing this for offsite backups, this is not the solution. I would say for a cheap trick get a usb drive of equal size and perform an rsync to the drive of your data each night. The first sync will take some time but the daily ones should be fairly quick unless you have a large amount of changes per day.

Other options would be Ghost, it does this type of image backups rather well. Image to the usb drive. It can even do incremental images so you do not have to do a full one each time.

And I am sure if you look long enough will find other BETTER solutions than breaking a RAID array each night.
 
He is thinking of it for offsite backup I believe. Right now I am backing up our data to a usb drive, using windows backup, two separate drives, one every other week, full backup Sunday night, incremental backups every other night, and the drive comes home with me every night. Do you think continuing this would be a better choice than the Raid 1 idea?
 
Raid!=Backup
Raid protects uptime, not data integrity. Stick with what you're doing now.
 
Oldbenwa said:
He is thinking of it for offsite backup I believe. Right now I am backing up our data to a usb drive, using windows backup, two separate drives, one every other week, full backup Sunday night, incremental backups every other night, and the drive comes home with me every night. Do you think continuing this would be a better choice than the Raid 1 idea?
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YES, seriously why is your solution not as good for him?
 
I really have no idea why he wants to do this. He probably heard about it from "Joecomputerwhizwannabe" and thought it sounded cool or something. I guess I'll try to explain it to him better.
 
Oldbenwa said:
I really have no idea why he wants to do this. He probably heard about it from "Joecomputerwhizwannabe" and thought it sounded cool or something. I guess I'll try to explain it to him better.
Click to expand...

You really should, he spent decent money on that server. The least he could do is spend a few bucks to properly backup the data.
 
Haven't spent any money.... yet. Was just about to order it up, when he said he wanted to do this. Gotta come up with reasoning/sources as to why not to do what he wants. Don't know how exactly to convince him.
 
So talked him out of it. Still going to do the Raid 1 array, but not pulling the mirror ever, and continuing our current backup strategy.

Do you guys think having a separate Raid 1 array for the O/S has any value? Would save ~500 dollars to not do it.

Also, is it possible to have two Raid 1 arrays on the same controller? Dell doesn't seem to think so.
 
Think of it this way in regards to the OS in RAID 1:

In the event of a failure with no RAID..... hours downtime X number of employees not working....is this less than $500? Most likely not even close. (At our hourly rate our office is over $1000/hr of chargable time when you add up all the employees).


My company just had a server built in Feb of this year and we have 2x146gb SCSI drives in RAID 1. Everything is one big partition, our network tech explained that it was easier to back it all up - everything in one big partition - and no issues with not enough space on the OS or data drive/partition or vice versa. Also, 2 drives have half the failure rate as 4 drives. We're at about 50% drive space capacity and have 10-12 years worth of space at our current expansion rate.

Our backup is a 160/320 tape drive and with tapes, installation, and setup it was just under $2000. Our office manager changes the tape every morning and takes the previous nights backup home each evening so we have a daily offsite backup. We rotate 5 Friday tapes so we can go back over a month if we need to. Further, every 3 months we do a backup run that one of the owners takes home and is permanently stored, i.e. not returned to the office ever.

You could simplify your setup and go with a pair of 300gb drives in RAID 1 and add a 320gb tape backup.


Roughly our costs for the server:

$3500 hardware - dual 3ghz Xeon server, battery backup, server rack
$4000 software (incl. 2003 SBS, Backup Exec, Symantec Corporate AV & Spam filtering)
$5000 labor to build, transfer our old data, set up old Dell server as a terminal server, connect 20 users and convert them to Exchange, set up SQL server, misc software issues (@$112.50/hr)
$2000 tape backup
============
$14,500

Not cheap, but worth every penny we paid for it.
 
Multiple RAID arrays per controller depends on the controller. However many allow for this but not all so Dell could be right. Best thing to do is research the controller they are using.

I normally setup our OS drives with RAID1 just because it is a very simple reliable RAID level. As the other poster mention $500 in hardware is chump change compared to time lost. For home use this is different but in the business world some contractors charge more than $500/hr.
 
Oldbenwa said:
Haven't spent any money.... yet. Was just about to order it up, when he said he wanted to do this. Gotta come up with reasoning/sources as to why not to do what he wants. Don't know how exactly to convince him.
Click to expand...

How about this? Everytime the idiot removes the drive he risks damaging the drive. Hard drives were not meant to be moved around a whole lot. Plus he can drop it at anytime or spill something on it or whatever.

What if he is involved in a car accident on the way home and the drive is destroyed? Stranger things have happened.

His idea is not only unsound, but outright absurd.

Oldbenwa said:
So talked him out of it. Still going to do the Raid 1 array, but not pulling the mirror ever, and continuing our current backup strategy.

Do you guys think having a separate Raid 1 array for the O/S has any value? Would save ~500 dollars to not do it.

Also, is it possible to have two Raid 1 arrays on the same controller? Dell doesn't seem to think so.
Click to expand...

Yes you can. Most controllers should support multiple logical drives.
 
Dan_D said:
How about this? Everytime the idiot removes the drive he risks damaging the drive. Hard drives were not meant to be moved around a whole lot. Plus he can drop it at anytime or spill something on it or whatever.
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That's pretty much what I told him, besides the idiot part. ;)
 
Yikes.... :)

Just take 2x drives Raid 1, 20 gig partition for OS and the rest for data. Sometimes being not so creative has it's pluses.
 
marty9876 said:
Yikes.... :)

Just take 2x drives Raid 1, 20 gig partition for OS and the rest for data. Sometimes being not so creative has it's pluses.
Click to expand...

Did I invite you here Mary? :p

That's kinda what I'm thinking of doing now, save a few bucks.
 
Getting a tape drive? Most unfun money you will ever spend, get a nice one thou....
 
The std. practice where I work is RAID1with 2 partitions for OS and APPS, and RAID5 for data if needed. If you want a backup of accessible data use robocopy/synctoy or some other copy software each day to mirror the data you need to protect.
 
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