Out of curiosity how important is hard drive redundancy? Even though I've had quite a few hard drives quite literally disintegrate before my eyes I've never really dealt with the idea of HDD redundancy. Ideas? Thoughts?
Backup and redundancy are different, which do you actually want? All of my data is rsynced to another internal drive every day and occasionally to an external that lives at my brother's house. Mainly because photos, some documents and other memories are priceless whilst hard drives are cheap.
Redundancy prevents downtime and data loss in the event of a single drive failure (or multiple drives in large RAID arrays), as said it is nothing to do with backup or data security. Sent from my phone...
For your average consumer.. no point in redundancy provided you have functional backups. Takes more of an importance for business users for whom downtime represents a loss of profit/productivity. I toyed with the idea briefly, but now I just back everything up as failures are few and far between
My NAS has redundancy but I back it up to another NAS with redundancy as well. Redundant disks means that you don't lose the new/updated files created since your last backup but it won't help in a data corruption scenario. Sent from my phone...
If you have old hard drives lying around then a weekly or daily backup is good enough for most people. Generally people don't have extremely sensitive information. If you are looking to buy a new hard drive then might as well do a RAID 1. Basically two drives mirror each other so all your stuff is automatically written twice. Its much easier to do than manual backup but you have to buy another hard drive of the exact same model.
You'll laugh at this. Friend of mine bought 3x Samsung F1's 500Gb models back when they were sh*t hot, put them together in a software RAID 5 configuration and used SmartMontools for email alerts *if" anything went wrong like drive death. Roll on 2 years, his phone pings on the desk at work only to tell me "feck drive has gone down, oh well the array can cope" 3 hours later Ping! "Sh*t, another drive has died! WTF" After he got home he checked the drives and found that the batch numbers were sequential. The moral of the story, hedge your bets and buy a different brand drive for your backup or at least a different model number if your buying them all at once, because most likely they'll be pulled from the same box at the e-retailer.
Hmm I was wondering on viability on redundancy vs backup, but I suppose I didn't actually articulate that properly. Thanks for the insight though. Fascinating how RAID really isn't that good.
Technically I was explaining the pitfalls of redundancy when using RAID 5 and a sequential batch number of HDD's. Ideally if you want a decent redundant setup it's RAID 6 all the way or better as you can weather the storm of two drives going belly up. Really once one drive goes tits up, it's time to get a replacement asap. I prefer software raid as it's more flexible at the cost of performance when compared to hardware; but as with all raid arrays it's not just the HDD's that can throw a fit, I've seen controllers fail.
