nikonnate Loc: Woodbury MN

I picked up a gaming PC over the weekend and now get to tweak it - my top 2 tweaks are a new power supply (RTX 2080 cards should not be run on 500W PSUs) and a RAID 1 setup for my storage drive(s). I've never done a RAID so please, geeks, help me understand this if you can:

My system came with a 2TB storage drive. I was hoping to dump a pair of Black WD 4TB drives in to a custom build but the bride is balking at that kind of 'new cost' after putting in a good chunk of cash to the stock build, so can I put in one of them now, letting the first 2TB mirror the stock drive and add the second 4TB later, as a second mirror, effectively treating the first 4TB drive as a holding device for a copy of the drive information? Or would it be smarter/ easier to just put in a second 2TB drive?

Second, what's the easiest way to do this in Win10? I'm no stranger to BIOS settings but this new system blows through boot-up so fast there's almost no opportunity to press a key and interrupt the boot.

smf85 Loc: Freeport, IL

Setting up the raid in windows is straightforward and done through disk manager. There isn’t any need to use the BIOS. Software raid is not high performance.

Software R1 raid requires pairs of identical drives. So the 2TB is mirrored to another 2TB and the 4TB is mirrored to another 4TB. The drives should be from the same manufacturer - I’ve seen hard to debug failures from not quite identical drives.

It you want to start with a single 4TB drive and mirror it later you can. When you do this the system will copy all the data from one drive to another. This results in a performance impact.

Hardware raid is a better idea - much higher performance relative to its price. But again it is expensive and your often limited to drives from the chassis manufacturer. But if you have a RaID option in BIOS you have hardware raid available to you from the disk drive card.

NCMtnMan Loc: N. Fork New River, Ashe Co., NC

RAID 1 is drive mirroring. Both drives must be the same size or the mirror drive must be larger. If it is larger, then the excess is not usable for other purposes. Technically, RAID is not for data protection, but is used to limit down time. Reason being that if a file becomes corrupt or deleted on the master drive, it is also corrupt or deleted on the slave drive of the mirrored pair. Depending on how you plan to use your system and how much data you will accumulate, a second drive used for backup might be a better choice at this point. You did not say, but if you current drive is an SSD drive, then you would need the exact same model and capacity for mirroring. If it isn't an SSD, then I would recommend that you purchase an SSD to become your primary drive and use you current one for backup. You will get a significant performance boost with the SSD drive. To clone the existing 2tb drive to an SSD, you will typically need 2tb SSD. I use and prefer Samsung drives. If you are confused by all this and need more help, then send me a private message and I'll try to help.

In-lightened Loc: Kansas City

Not being technical...at all....if you decide to use external drives for storage without the RAID system, I have found the GoodSync works very well with Windows and use that to back up my externals.

nikonnate Loc: Woodbury MN

I should clarify with some specs.

I picked up an Obelisk 875-0024 on a heck of a Memorial Day sale. It packs a 256GB SSD for software and a 2TB storage drive. This weekend I'm replacing the PSU (easy) and was hoping to RAID 1 a drive for the storage. I know it's not fail-proof, a virus can obliterate it just as easily as a non-RAID setup, so I intend to to utilize external backup as well - just less frequently. I'd like to RAID my non-SSD storage so it's a little more fail-resistant since my bride will never forgive me if I lost all my pics of our new kid.

Knowing that, does it change anything?

alvin3232 Loc: Houston, TX

Here is some good information below which gives you a bit more detail information on raids.
https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/disk-mirroring

A good online online backup if you choose to use would be.
www.carbonite.com

alexol

Apologies in advance if I am wrong on this, but I had always understood that you cannot boot from a RAID drive?

That was also a problem for an on-board mirrored drive. My idea was to have D: be an exact copy of C:, so that if C: died I could just remove it and plug in D: as C: and be up and running again in minutes. Apparently you can't do that either due to the requirement for there to be only one boot disk.

Any education will be gratefully received.

TBerwick Loc: Houston, Texas

Alexoi, you can certainly boot from a RAID drive and when I build servers, I use motherboards that allow me to set up BIOS controlled RAID1 for the boot, and generally RAID5 for the data. RAID1 is 2 identical drives and you have to build the RAID before you load the operating system if using the BIOS version. If either drive fails, its partner takes over the duties until you can replace the dead unit.

RAID5 is 3 or more identical drives that are linked together in the BIOS or off of a RAID plug in card usually of a PCIe form factor. You lose the storage space of 1 drive as it is dedicated to a parity bit and that allows you to rebuild the RAID if 1 of the drives dies.

I try to avoid software RAIDs because they rebuild themselves if the machine does not shut down properly, ie a power off reboot or power outage with no UPS in place. The rebuild can be very time consuming if you have a large volume that has to remirror and machine performance is extremely slow if that occurs.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

The use of any sort of Raid does NOT mean you don't need backup !
Over the years I have found that with Raid 5 (if you get that far) at least 20-30% of the time you seem to end up with more than 1 drive failing at the same time thus rendering the use of Raid 5 for redundancy somewhat problematical. Hence the need for backups.
And you need to make sure that any Raid system will report the failure of a single drive immediately because otherwise you won't know you have a failed drive.
I once had a Raid 01 with 2 failed drives and the customer didn't know about it for 12 months, then the 3rd drive became intermittent after 18 months and it was only then that the customer found he was minus so many drives (the customer was not mine fortunately). The only thing that saved him was a recent tape based backup.
So if you want to use Raid make sure you know exactly what Raid level you want and why and have made provision for a suitable backup.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I use an external Synology NAS with two 3TB drives - 4TB would have been better. The setup was a no-brainer. I don't like having too many drives inside the computer case. I have an M.2 C drive (500GB) and 4TB and 2TB internal drives. I also have two 3TB drives in an external enclosure for backing up.

alexol

TBerwick - Very good to know, thank you!

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

Simply, With a RAID Mirror setup, any drive capacity larger than the smallest drive is wasted. So if the existing single drive is 2 TB, there's no point in adding larger drives.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

My first and only comment is go for three drives: One 1-2 TB drive as good drive and application storage. Then a pair of 4-6-8TB drives set us as RAID 1. I think you'll get more mileage this way.

Ghery Loc: Olympia, WA

RAID 1 (Mirroring) is nothing new. We used it when I worked for Tandem Computers back in the 1980s and early 1990s. It offers you a level of fault tolerance. If a drive went down you would operate off the other while the failed unit was replaced without shutting the system down. "Revive" was used to bring the new drive up to the contents of the drive that didn't fail. Of course, the Tandem systems took that even farther by having two disc controllers "talk" to the drives, so a disc controller failure didn't shut you down. And, each controller was talking to two processors. Again, fault tolerance. Any part could be replaced without shutting the system down. Does this work for a PC? No way, you couldn't afford it and it really isn't necessary. But, if you needed a system whose availability is 24/7/365, it was a great way to go.

Now, I have a box that is RAID 5. Great, except there still is a single point of failure, and it died and seems to be made of "unobtainium". The power supply. The box is many years old, so I've got 4 256 GB SATA drives that are useless to me. Oh well, not like they're new or anything like that.

My point is that nothing is failure proof. Back ups and more backups. At least one of which needs to be off site. What happens if they are all local and your house burns down? Am I paranoid? Perhaps, but Carbonite has bailed me out when a laptop was infected by a malware program that encrypted my photographs. I still don't know how that malware got installed, but having an offsite backup was priceless that day.

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

To reply/add to myself:

Another big basic about RAID I learned by experience....

RAID mirroring SHOULD NOT be thought of as no-fuss automatic backup drives. The purpose of RAID is to have redundancy in the computer itself. If a drive in a RAID array fails you can replace it and the the controller will configure it and make it part of the mirror array. A drive in a RAID array cannot be taken out, connected to another computer via USB, and read. Raid drives are linked to the RAID controller that created them. Only an identical RAID controller can see and read what's on them.them.

If you want to have drives in your computer as BACKUPS to the primary drive, or have external drives as backups there are ways to sync them, triggered manually or scheduled. FreeFileSync is a good, free program to use for this.