[Concelor]

So I built my first HTPC
After collecting all my media to the new drive, I realized it would suck if I ever lost all 1.5 tb
So I'm thinking before I start tweaking XBMC I want to have some insurance, I'm thinking raid plus 2 more 1.5 TB hard drives
the MB I have Asrocks E350M1 has 1 PCI E slot and I'd like to add a RAID card
This is my first time wanting a true RAID system, maybe RAID 5
Can anyone recommend a good slim profile raid card, advice, or suggestions ?

[numb7rs]

Decent RAID cards are more expensive than you'd think. I find it more economical to just have a second drive for backup.

[Concelor]

Really?
I was expecting under 200 but more than that?
so best way is just to have hard drive backing everythign up?

[numb7rs]

Erm, under 200 is about right, but that's much more than I'm willing to pay. There's also the single point of failure that I don't like. If your card goes in a RAID 5, you need to replace it before you can access any of your data.

As fun as a RAID array is, in my opinion it is not a good substitution for backing up.

[eskro]

preferred raid by many of us is 'unRAID' ....
this would require you to buy a new rig just for that...
unless you have spare parts laying around...
unRAID software is free if u have a 3hdd array...

http://www.lime-technology.com/products/...ation-keys

[soulnothing]

I agree with numb7rs, after a number of failed discs, restoring a raid is not what I would call "fun".

This is somewhat dependent's on the operating system. I used to use raid consistently then I had a number of drives fail, and rebuilding the structure took quite some time. I switched to simply r syncing the drives nightly.

You don't need a card specifically you can also do software raid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_RA...based_RAID

The card is also limited to the throughput of the slot its in. Since its an e350 I'm thinking pci x4, a pci x16 slot running at x4. So as per Wikipedia each lane offers ~500MB/s, * 4 = through put of 2GB/s. So you shouldn't hit the throughput ceiling.

Windows to my recollections , on desktop does raid 0 pretty much disk spanning. Server can do the various types of raid.

Linux lvm does raid 0/1, 1 is what you want just mirroring two drives. I did the 0/JBOD implementation which was a pain to recover when a disk failed.

But I would say just rsync the two drives together.

an example of a command

rsync -Pa --delete --ignore-exsisting source target
-P display progress
-a This is equivalent to -rlptgoD. It is a quick way of saying you want recursion and want to preserve almost everything <- copied from man rsync
--ignore-exsisting Skips present files
--delete deletes files as it moves along that are no longer present in the source.

[Concelor]

So basically using windows and that LVM or window equivalent, and not buying anything but some extra hard drives I can have an up to date copy of the drive?

[nemek]

There is no way to recovery from raid 0 if one of disks fail
+1 for software raid 1 (mirroring) - this way even if 1 (or more - depends on how much disk u want to put) disk fail your data will be still safe (as long as at least 1 disk will be working)

[Concelor]

That's exactly what I'm looking for and it sounds $$$-smart :-)

[soulnothing]

Not really, windows desktop only offers software raid 0. The various server versions offer other versions of raid.

For clarification
raid 0, combines two disks into one
raid 1, mirroring with no parity. Been ages since I've done raid one, but don't you need both volumes for it to work. I.E. one drive fails you need to rebuild the array before reuse i think.

So windows desktop just combines two drives into one, and if one goes you can pretty much say good bye to all the data. There are recovery tools/options but they are not easy or guaranteed. I'm not trying to sound like the harbinger of doom, but I've been bitten by this myself.

LVM does raid 1 & raid 0.

But again if one volume goes you usually need to take time to rebuild the array. Then it also limited to linux.

I'd say simply scheduled copying diska -> diskb.

If you had say 3 1.5TBs raid5 would be doable.
But you would need an o/s that can do that software raid version. FreeBSD(zfs), windows server, linux, etc.

Or a hardware card, expensive, and I think that in some cases the raid array is dependent on the card. I.E. the raid card goes you need to buy that same card again to use your data.
The other thing to consider is that a majority of the cards under the 200$ price point are pci-x1. Which going back to lanes depending on version of pci-x, ranges from 250MB/s -> 1GB/s a lane. This all total, both ways. The last piece is a lot of the cards under 100$, are usually just a software raid wrapper. Making your cpu do all the heavy lifting.

Rsync
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
Although rsync is best in multiples of 2, i.e. if you do 3 you need to think the partitioning scheme carefully. It will also be delayed based on how often you schedule it to run.
or
unraid
http://www.lime-technology.com/
On a consumer level is my recommendation.

Edited again just recalled the other linux tool
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdadm

[Concelor]

So soulnothing your saying best bet with windows is once a month copy what I want to back up from one hard drive to another

[soulnothing]

On windows desktop yes.
Sorry i tend to be verbose and long winded .

I would do more than monthly though.
My rsync is set
every two hours complete sync do not delete removed files.
Every other day at midnight, delete old files.

This gives me time to recover something in case I want it back.

[numb7rs]

I'm also using rsync on linux, but have not created a schedule. Whenever I change something big or important, I turn on my external drive, run a customised rsync command, then turn it off again. Simple as that.

Here's the script I run:

Code:

rsync -avh --stats --delete --exclude 'lost+found' --exclude Downloads/ --exclude .Tras*/ /media/Media/ /media/Backup/

[Subliminal Aura]

This is somewhat dependent's on the operating system. I used to use raid consistently then I had a number of drives fail, and rebuilding the structure took quite some time. I switched to simply r syncing the drives nightly.

....

But I would say just rsync the two drives together.

+1 Showing some more rsync love

I too am all for this approach and have over the past few months moved away a very elaborate NAS with hot live mirrored failover to something that is simple, consuming a fraction of power whilst not compromising on services

Also have you guys not considered identifying and segregating critical from expendable data. Do we really need to maintain a cache of 10 Terabytes of data ? As mentioned rebuilding arrays can be a real pain / risk - even worse if you lose the RAID card or motherboard

For me currently, critical data accounts for only around 1TB everything else is expendable. So my set up comprises of a HTPC with the critical data/services running 24/7 with an archive of movies on disks that are mostly sleeping.

At 4am the HTPC wakes up the backup server which is a grand old machine with an athlon XP or something with a whole bunch of old drives in it. The backup server finds/wakes all the machines on my LAN to back them up (rsync/rpc acronis)

Obviously if I want an immediate backup then it's simply a matter of powering on the backup server and it does the rest for me.

So soulnothing your saying best bet with windows is once a month copy what I want to back up from one hard drive to another

My windows machines run Acronis for incremental/differential backups - I can't recommend it enough - It's saved my skin a few times

[&gt;&gt;X&lt;&lt;]

You might want to look at Flexraid if your running windows