[ZmaN]

I've been having problems with my computer lately..

Unfotunatly, my computer decided to once again commit suicide.  I think one of my hard drives failed and now I cant get it to boot XP..

Well I have two reasons for posting this:
1:  I wanted to know if anyone here has experience with failing RAID Arrays.  I ned to find every possible way to fix it so I can get at least some of my data off the drive.  This stuff Includes music, freespace stuff, mods to games, Emails, and Unreplacable CD images of CDs that were destroyed awhile ago..
2:  I'm also posting this to let you know that my FTP will be down for a little while I try to recover my data. 

I Mainly need ways to get this stuff off without having to redownload it and replace all of it....
I would appreciate any help.
Oh and I got a Creative Zen Sleek.  Just ordered it yesterday, and it should be here in a week.  Just thought I should spread the word.

Thanks guys, Z

[kasperl]

Mirrored, striped, or RAID 5?

If mirrored, AFAIK, you're fuct.

[neoterran]

If you run RAID level 0 without a backup, and one of the disks dies... you're not going to be able to recover the information unless you pay a very expensive forensic hard drive fee. (thousands)

If you do run RAID 0, you should be aware that it doubles your chances of losing information from a disk failure, statistically speaking. Always have a backup of your important files somewhere off disk.

[Nix]

Mirrored, striped, or RAID 5?

If mirrored, AFAIK, you're fuct.

Actually, other way around.  If you're mirrored, you have a direct 1:1 copy of the drive.  Insert a new drive and rebuild the array, the mirror copy will plunk back onto the new drive.

If you're striped, back up as much as possible, and prepare for the worst.  I've ran two IDE drives in RAID, and saw no real performance boost.  I took them out of the RAID config and put them into the standard IDE controller.

D'oh.. Forgot another thing.  Check your cables.  Try new cables.  Always check the physical connections before throwing up your hands in defeat and blaming the drive. 

Raid 0 = Stripe
Raid 1 = Mirror
Raid 5 = Distributed via Parity blocks. (minimum of 3 drives needed, 5 to be best)
Hybrid RAID setups.
Raid 0+1 = One striped array that gets mirrored onto other drives.  Minimum of 4 drives needed, and quite wasteful for personal use.  I say ditch RAID.  I'd rather have reliability over speed, and from what I've seen, RAID setups aren't all that exciting.  Basically, it's yet another way to say your male appendage is bigger than others.  (from what I've seen..)

[Descenterace]

RAID-0 isn't really RAID.
Redundant Array of Independant Disks: There's nothing redundant about RAID-0. The speed boost is typically minimal too, so I can't understand why anyone would bother with it. Hardware RAID-5 gives a similar boost and is far more robust, but the hradware costs upwards of £100...

[Kazan]

Nix raid is good for servers we had a harddrive failure in one of our arrays yesterday.  pull the drive, put in the new one, rebuild

[neoterran]

RAID-0 isn't really RAID.
Redundant Array of Independant Disks: There's nothing redundant about RAID-0. The speed boost is typically minimal too, so I can't understand why anyone would bother with it. Hardware RAID-5 gives a similar boost and is far more robust, but the hradware costs upwards of £100...

I can't agree with this. I often see people making this statement. One time a friend of mine was insistent on it. I brought him over to my house to see my RAID-0 stripe with 2x10,000 rpm raptor SATA drives. Once he saw the speed of the windows load, he was sold. 

[Nix]

Nix raid is good for servers we had a harddrive failure in one of our arrays yesterday.  pull the drive, put in the new one, rebuild

Emphasis on the words "personal use".    RAID in a home or a gaming machine is honestly a waste of time and much more prone to data loss than running your two drives independently.  I've done two presentations on this subject, and I'm very well aware of what each RAID setup can and cannot do.

RAID 5 in a business, or if you're serving, yes, is a great thing to have.  It's better to go with Raid 5 anyway because you only take up a slice of each disk instead of an entire hard drive doing the same exact thing the other drive is doing solely for backup, unless you absolutely need a full mirror copy of a system-critical drive.

Neoterran, (D'oh!) you have raptor hard drives.  The drives alone are incredibly faster than thier SATA I/II counterparts, and way faster than IDE/100 drives.  THAT'S where your speed comes from.  If you put a raptor in any situation, it's going to be way speedier than using other SATA drives.  Still, the performance boost is actually very minimal.  I just say you're really playing with fire when you run a stripe.  IMO, the risks taken are not worth the minimal speed boost, and think of all the space that will get wasted if you have one large drive, instead of piecing it out into smaller partitions.  I mean, if you seperated the drives, having them run on thier own channels (with sata, you must run one drive per channel, I know this.....) you're making more efficient use of your available disk space, and making it easier to recover data in case of a catastrophic failure. 

Unless you can post some benchmarks that prove otherwise, made by yourself, and not some biased review site, then I'd be more inclined to believe a stripe can actually give speed benefits.  But from personal experience, and research into this subject, it's just not worth the risk.

[neoterran]

Okay, I can post some benchmarks. What was the D'Oh for ? 

Here's the benchmarks. This is definately better than a single Raptor, and these are the older 36 GB ones that came out in 2003.
Feel free to use HD Tach to bench your own drive for comparison.

BTW, I simply maintain a backup of my important files on a seperate harddrive, and also hard copies on DVD. Very simple.

think of all the space that will get wasted if you have one large drive, instead of piecing it out into smaller partitions.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that. I hope you are aware that making a RAID 0 array will give the operating system one large drive the size of both disks put together, but you can still partition it any which way you want, i have several partitions on my RAID Array.
I would also like to point out this array has been running without a SINGLE problem since early 2003. that's 3 years. Not bad.

[ZmaN]

Well, 2 days later and 25 GB of data lost, I got my PC back up and running...
I managed to get most of my music back from my sister and some friends over AIM.  I also was able to redownload my freespace stuff (some of it, I didn't go to crazy with that yet).
I didnt mention that I was using a JBOD array, not an actual RAID Array, but its the same concept, and no speed difference (I mainly use it to make one large logical drive for windows).

Anyways I got my FTP back up, got some of my data back over the internet, and I also replaced on of the hard drives that were in there (I had a year old 120 GB western Digital and an Old 40 GB Seagate that I still cant get to work as a stand alone).  I replaced the Seagate with an older IBM drive and reinstalled windows on it.  Hopefully that will end my problems, since I've had problems getting this drive to work right from day one (I think i realize why my uncle just gave it to me).

I put the FTP back together using Serv-U instead of Windows XP Pro IIS (I installed XP home instead of XP pro, couldnt find my XP pro cd until AFTER I had most of my stuff installed so i'm not going through all of it again just for XP pro)...

Anyways thanks for your input guys..  Still got some stuff to reinstall and I gotta go reconfigure my email so I'll see you guys later...

Z

[ZmaN]

Oh, and my Zen Sleek Photo is on the way!

[Nix]

Okay, I can post some benchmarks. What was the D'Oh for ? 

Accidentally quoted Descenterace instead of you.  Didn't realise it till a while after I posted, in case anyone else was reading at the time.

Ok, that's all fine and dandy, but what are you going to do when a faster, better controller comes out?  What do you do if your controller dies?  You'll need to have the same exact controller, and probably firmware to make sure you can still access your data.  IF you use a Highpoint controller to create your array, then put that array on a Promise controller, your array will have to be rebuilt.  Unless there's a workaround for this, I have no idea, but I think it's correct to say that arrays are only compatible with the controller that created them.

I also do understand that you can partition arrays just like standalone drives, as I did that back on my old IDE array.  I've found that if you partition your drives, you don't have a lot of wasted space due to formatting overhead, that and I find that I'm much more organized if everything is seperated.

All I can really say at this point is just back up often and prepare to lose EVERYTHING if something does go wrong in the future.  I can also say I'd rather have reliability over speed, so meh, there you go. 

[neoterran]

Well, good points I suppose. But as I said, I won't lose everything becasue I have weekly backups 1.)To external 200 GB disks and 2.) To DVDs (for the really important stuff) If my controller fails (an extremely rare thing considering the life of this computer is probably going to be another 5 years or so at most) then I'll need a new motherboard, as it's a silicon image controller on the mobo. If the array fails due to a bad disk, I simply replace the disk, rebuild the array, restore my system from an image (on the external drives). Voila ! back up and running.

I even recommend this regimen for those NOT running on an ARRAY. Drives can die anytime and they're the most common component to die in any system.