Get started with RAID

Lifehacker is running a nice article for beginners on how to set up your own RAID system…

Hard drives fail, and they do it much more often than we’d like to think. Even if you’ve set up automated hard drive backups, you’re not necessarily getting the best backup bang for your buck—especially if your operating system’s main hard drive fails. Even if you’ve been backing up your important files, you’ll still need to reinstall your OS and go through the pain of copying your files back to your new hard drive, installing new applications, and setting up your system to how you had it. There’s a better way, my friends. With a RAID 1 array, you’ll always have a perfect backup of your hard drive so that—in the event that one drive fails—the other will seamlessly pick up where it left off. That means no reinstalling your operating system, no reinstalling applications, and no time lost in the event of a hard drive failure.

However, don’t think of it as completely bulletproof as they suggest: the basic idea of RAID assumes that only one disk will fail at a time. In theory this is great, but in practice I’ve had 3 disks in a RAID set fail simultaneously, rendering the system useless.

Posted: February 7th, 2008
Categories: Tips & Tricks
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