Mirroring vs Raid

surfasb · 16 Jan 2010

Digerati said:

If it all boils down to costs, I think you would do better to look into a good backup routine, and skip RAID altogether.

Amen. If you can't afford a decent RAID card, then I wouldn't even bother. The reason why good RAID cards are so expensive is because of not only the hardware, but more importantly the software.

There are countless admins out there that will tell you the horror stories of fights with the RAID card's interface to restore their array. Good (read: expensive) RAID cards make the restore operation a relatively painless behavior. If a two hour operation is worth <$300, then you are better off just sticking with a decent backup routine.

Probably the most affordable RAID card I'd ever recommend is the LSI MegaRAID.

546 Inspiron · 23 Mar 2010

White Cat said:

I have a limited amount of funds and want to make the best of it. Right now I am juggling 3TB of space and I want to make the best of it.

Can I simply have more info on windows seven mirroring please?

I think that mirroring confusion you brought up is; windows 7 has a software mirroring function so you can mirror what you have on a drive to an external drive which is a way of restoring your drive if something happened to it. (a poor mans raid1), but not a bad idea because you don't have to put all your data on it. I have 2 drives in raid 1 and an external drive just as a luxury but there is no way I would depend on the raid for a back-up. If I were you I would use the mirror feature and forget about raid1. Just put your vital contents on a partition on the ext drive and back up your constantly changing data to the other partition on the ext drive.