you'd configure it as raid 5.
that being said, cheap raid boxes like that are the opposite of safety.
if the box dies, your data is gone.
you're putting yourself in a scenario where data loss happens 1x in 10 years. same as single drive.
just drop the manufacturer an email asking how to recover from controller failure in say 3-5 years, see what they say.
if you want safety: onboard raid 1 (cheap) or a proper hardware controller + enterprise drives (1500$+).
Horse feathers! This forum and especially other forums I'm on are littered with posts from people losing data from failed drives. Drives can, and do, catastrophically fail with no hope of data recovery of any kind (controller PCBs aren't the only things that fail) or data can only be recovered with expensive professional data recovery (and even that is no guarantee).
I've said it before and I will say it again; RAID is not a backup. RAID (except for 0) is redundancy that will protect you from data loss if one or two drives, depending on the type of RAID, should fail and allow the computer to keep chugging along without interruption until the dead drive can be replaced. However, drive failure isn't the only way to lose data.
Data can be lost due to viruses and other malware, natural disasters (flood, fire, etc.), user error (accidental deletions, etc.), theft, equipment failure (such as a power surge or a failing PSU fries all the internal HDDs), etc., things RAID
CANNOT protect you against. Only separately located backups that get connected to the computer only when updating the backup will protect you.
But don't take my word for it. Sean Webster, over on the Overclock. net Forums, runs the forums' storage forum, works with all types of drives professionally, and has forgotten more about drives than all of us here combined will ever know.
Here is a snippet of what Sean has to say about RAID not being a backup:
First off, data is not backed up up unless it is in 3 or more separate locations! (with one being offsite)
Backup is a pretty simple topic. You have your precious data such as photos, videos, documents, music, and even just program files and game saves on your PC and you don't want to lose it right? Well, if so then you should always backup of your data in some sort of way.
There are two categories of backup: system backup and file backup. A system backup is when you copy everything verbatim on the OS hard drive onto an external storage medium, including the operating system, applications and data. If the drive fails, the computer can be restored to its former state.
File backup copies only data files onto an external storage medium. If the drive fails, the OS and applications have to be re-installed.
I like to do a mix of both of these to cover my butt in case of anything. You will see what I do exactly in the following steps.
RAID is not designed to replace a proper backup solution, it's there to protect against drive failures with minimal to no down time. I don't understand why some people think that just because different RAIDs such as RAID 5 or RAID 6 can take a drive loss and still maintain data integrity that their data is backed up. It simply is not. Data needs to be in multiple places to actually be backed up, not just a single RAID volume in a single PC/location.
RAID arrays do NOT protect against:
- Boot Sector Corruption
- Human error (deleting files by mistake)
- RAID controller/software failure
- Fire, flood, or other calamity such as an EMP in your PC...
- Theft, hacker attack, or other offensive action
- Multiple disk failures and Unrecoverable Read Error
- Data corruption
- Virus'
Ok, he stretched it a bit with EMP (hence the stuck out tongue emoticon) but, otherwise, the point should be pretty clear. Another gentleman on the same forums (don't tell him I called him a gentleman) who goes by Lord Zeb is a Mac computer repairman. He has shared numerous horror tales of customers who have lost all their data to failed drives, including some arrays, simply because they didn't have a proper backup scheme in place.
I personally use a set of four backup HDDs for every HDD in my computer. Two of each set are stored onsite in a drawer away from my computer at home (I connect the onsite HDDs to my computer only while updating a backup) and the other two are kept offsite in my safe deposit box at my credit union. I swap out the onsite and offsite HDDs no less than once a month, depending on how much data I have added or changed since the previous swap.
Since the offsite HDDs will not have data that was added or changed after they were put in the safe deposit box, I also have a Carbonite.com account, primarily to fill that gap. If my computer and onsite backups get destroyed or otherwise lost, I could recover all my data from Carbonite should I lose my but, since it would take several weeks to several months to download it all (to my ISP's great dismay), I can quickly recover most of my data from the offsite HDDs and the remaining data from Carbonite, making a full recovery taking only a day or two at most. Of course, should the unthinkable ever happen, such as meteor strike takes out my home and my credit union while I'm lucky enough to be out of town, I can still recover all my data from Carbonite (and my ISP can just build a bridge and get over it).
I keep duplicate backup HDDs in each location since even backup drives can fail (and I have had it happen). Also, since I don't use RAID (an interruption in operation is just a minor annoyance for me, not a catastrophe like it would be for, say, a business), it takes but a few minutes to disconnect a failed drive and temporarily replace it with one of the backup drives in a dock until I can get the failed drive replaced under warranty or with a new one. Getting a replacement takes only two or three days at most (of course, I could have one overnighted in but why spend more than I have to).
I use
Macrium Reflect Free (
here is a good tutorial on how to use Macrium Reflect) to image my C: drive (OS and programs only) and save the images to one of my data drives (for convenience), which then gets backed up.
I use a folder/file syncing program called
FreeFileSync to back up my data drives. FreeFileSync has a feature called versioning that saves deleted files to another folder or drive (I use a dedicated drive for that and also back it up) to protect me from accidental deletions and other user errors.
