RAID Storage for photos (1 Viewer)

I am considering a new PC with an SSD and two additional 2TB HDDs. I am thinking of having them arranged in a RAID 1 configuration for storing all my images.

My question is this:-

Has anyone on the forum used and operated this type of of RAID 1 configuration and what are the benefits of doing so?

Any negatives?

Anyone had any catastrophic failures using this config?

Any other recommnendations?

Cheers

Chris

Hello Chris,
I don't have any experience of the configuration, but have 1 piece of advice which is not to be lulled into a false sense of security with your resilience.. There are a multitude of things that could go wrong affecting the entire PC, so it is no substitute for "off-site" storage of your data.

Thinking about it, i'm not sure what the benefit would be assuming you are a domestic PC user who doesn't need high availability of your data. Once you have taken into consideration the cost and time of setting it up, and testing to ensure it performs as expected, plus procuring a compatible replacement if a disk fails, wouldn't like to say.

Apologies if I am teaching you to suck eggs. Would be interesting to see how it goes for you if you pursue this,

Peter

Hi Peter,

I have five portable drives that I use for back up of images and back up regularly. I know that RAID 1 basically cuts in half the available storage but there is always two copies of everything on the main HDDs without making copies on external drives.

I just want to simplify things on the main PC and get a machine with awesome performance and am considering getting a bespoke custom built PC for the job

Hi Chris, since this is about data integrity and safety, I'll start with SSDs

The most reliable SSDs are Intel, Samsung and Crucial (possibly Plextor too but it's too early to be sure); generally, the bigger they are in any given range, the faster they operate. I'd not consider anything less than 120GB, 240+ would be better (if money were no object).

Raid 1 is fine but ideally you would buy a 3rd disk ready to replace a possible failure early on; failures in any hardware tend to follow the 'bathtub effect', relatively high failures in the first few weeks, tailing off to almost zero failures through Months 2-3 until close to the end of the normal lifespan of the components (3~5 or 5~7 years, depending on drive quality?) then rising sharply again. Enterprise quality SATA drives are better than standard SATA.

Raid 1 is not a backup alternative, a bad power supply could take out both drives in seconds.

Seasonic and XFX are widely regarded as being the best consumer PSU brands, XFX are made by Seasonic. Some other 'makers' also have a few good PSUs in their ranges, some may even be Seasonic made but it's much more of a crapshoot. BeQuiet have a very good reputation in Europe. A good PSU wattage calculator is here: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

A quality UPS will cushion your setup from mains power anomalies.

If you use external drives for backup, try to buy 'vanilla' drives/enclosures, the more driver/software/hardware complexities there are, the lower your chances of data recovery from them. Network-attached storage may be better for local backups.

And an offsite backup is always good!

Andrew,

Thanks for the info

I am thinking about buying a custom built machine specifcally for photos and editing and looking at having it built by Chillblast. The SSD is a Samsung 840 Series 250gb drive.

As for external drives I always prefer the plug 'n' play types without any additional software and USB powered rather than ones that need their own power supply

You could try one of these http://iosafe.com/products-n2-overview