better to raid 1 or backup?

[kiyotaka]

thinking of getting a 2nd 300gb drive to keep a backup of the anime i have on my other.. Can't decide wether to raid it or Just backup the data once a week or so.. what is Healthier for a hdd.. to have a huge amount copied to it at once? (or is there a program that checks whats allready on it and updates new files)


Just trying to find the best way to Put the least stress on my the two drives.. and yes i have a raid controller. ^^

 

[905it]

Put the drives in RAID-1. This will allow them to backup automatically, will make sure that both drives have the exact image of the other.

When a hard drive failure happens, you can still run the machine on one drive until you get a replacement and then resync the data and continue working away.

NO DOWNTIME.

 

[kiyotaka]

how stressful is this for the drive? and does it hinder performance at all? (never dealt with raid 1 before just 0)

 

[905it]

By NOT using RAID-1, you will be copying files over to the drive all at once in huge chunks for a long period of time. This stresses the drive more than anything.

When you use RAID-1, read/write happens simultaneously on both drives.

If you want performance and relability, create a RAID 0+1 array. You will require 4 drives and something like the Promise FastTrak TX4000 SATA 3.0gb/s RAID PCI Card.

I run a RAID 0+1 array here on my slackware linux box with a journalling filesystem called REISERFS. Performance over my 100mbps network to my workstation running a RAID 0 array (Two SATA 3gb/s drives connected to Promise TX2300 PCI Card) is 10,000kb/s to 12,000kb/s.

(I'm waiting a few more weeks before I buy my 1gbps network gear, then it should be around 80,000kb/s to 90,000kb/s)