Best way to store your music: RAID 1 configuration? Who else has done it?
Dec 23, 2007 at 5:27 AM Post #61 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by wanderman /img/forum/go_quote.gif
raid 10 anyone >.>


The performance benifits of raid0 are largely a myth. It was designed to greatly increase the speed of streaming i/o operations, like reading and writing large continuous segments of data for media editing.

Your computer mainly relies on random i/o operations. It can actuially be much slower for random i/o if the drives are not identical, and from most real-world benchmarks at best marginally faster.

Depending on your operating system I'd be tempted to just go 3+1p under ZFS or just keep 2 seperate raid1 volumes.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 6:02 AM Post #62 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by ueyteuor /img/forum/go_quote.gif
you have a save and secure back-up of your treasure


Don't tempt fate.

I don't use DVDs so I'm not going to claim any expertise but I'd trust HDs more.
I'd make 2 copies of every DVD and test them regularly. Ideally, you'd have some scheme like this: Overview Or you could load every file and verify its integrity (assuming you have verifiable files).
Every storage media has its pitfalls and hassles. I wouldn't trust anything (including tape) enough to rely on a single copy.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 6:48 AM Post #63 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by hempcamp /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Your point is not a valid one precisely BECAUSE we are not talking mission-critical, enterprise solutions!

Sure, go ahead, RAID yourself silly --- but for what benefit? So you can show off your size? *Unless* you are using it for enterprise/mission-critical data, there is no benefit to the added cost/complexity/risk of a RAID.

Buy an external drive, back up to it from time to time, sleep soundly at night. Simple and cheap as that. And less risky to boot!

--Chris


Well, it's not cheap. In my opinion, RAID 5 is there to save you money, so you don't have to double up on hard drives. You'll get the value of n - 1, where n is the amount you bought. In the end, that doesn't sound like a raw deal at all, if you ask me. If you have a RAID 5 system, you also get speed, and the ability to have it all on one logical partition, instead of C:, D:, E:, F:, G:, etc.. for all your drives.

You also make the argument that backups are simple. Well, depending on how you do the RAID, it can also be simple. I simply configure a web interface with a couple of shares, and then map those shares to a drive letter. That's also simple.

Another poster mentioned the power supply blowing up and taking everything with it. It's possible, but how do you quantify that risk? It's good that you mention it, so those that read it can consider whether or not it's a real, imminent danger. Personally, I don't, but that's just me. I do take care when it's storming outside to unplug my components from the wall jack and not be running my computer, though, so there's a hazard that I try to mitigate.

Like I said, the value of RAID depends on the user. I'm not saying backups are bad. They're awesome! But they are theoretically the most expensive redundancy solution so... don't dismiss RAID in a separate file server as a solution for the benefits I mentioned above.

Edit: Looks like I've been editing this post too much.
tongue.gif
I'd like to mention that DVDs are not failsafe either. I've had maybe ~4% of my media come out with checksum errors (after long storage periods), which is one reason why I gave up on DVDs.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 7:42 AM Post #64 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by Cyrilix /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I'm not saying backups are bad. They're awesome! But they are theoretically the most expensive redundancy solution so...



Maybe backups to optical media. Backups to a second HD is cheaper than any RAID option, otherwise you're wasting money on mirroring without any extra HD space or you're throwing a good chunk of money into lots of HD's.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 8:41 AM Post #66 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by Redo /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Maybe backups to optical media. Backups to a second HD is cheaper than any RAID option, otherwise you're wasting money on mirroring without any extra HD space or you're throwing a good chunk of money into lots of HD's.


@Redo: Not necessarily. RAID functionality is integrated into many mainstream motherboards and Intel chipsets nowadays. Backup costs 2 x n, where n is the data you're trying to back up. RAID can cost anywhere up to 2 x n, but often cheaper. If you go for a really expensive solution, of course, it can be more expensive, but it doesn't have to be.

@HFat: That's right. Keep making fun of me and not addressing any of my points. I'm simply bringing anecdotal evidence to the table AND suggesting a potential alternative. If you have personally been shafted before (or if you've had a decent experience), I'd love to hear it. That would at least add more knowledge to the pool.

For reference, I use it for a media server, which is more than just music, however, if you just want to back up your music, it'll be a lot cheaper, so that's a plus for backup. For example, I have ~30 GB of music. It's trivial for me to find 30 GB of space, absolutely trivial, but to do this for all of my media would be expensive.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 9:06 AM Post #67 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by Cyrilix /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Keep making fun of me and not addressing any of my points.


I don't know that you've made a point that needs addressing. I just thinks it's funny to push RAID as something reliable on head-fi. As you can see, I'm easily amused.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cyrilix /img/forum/go_quote.gif
If you have personally been shafted before (or if you've had a decent experience), I'd love to hear it. That would at least add more knowledge to the pool.


I've had nothing but good experiences with RAID because I'm not using it to replace backups.
I'm currently using software RAID1 which stinks a whole lot less than proprietary hardware IMHO. For what that's worth, I also think that using RAID5 and such in small shops or at home nowadays is being penny wise and pound foolish.

The only way I've ever used RAID for backups is to avoid downtime by mirroring a system drive through RAID1... the reason I call it a backup is that, after syncing the array, the backup drive gets disconnected. I'm sure most OSs allow for a better way to do the same thing but this hack doesn't require reading so I like it. :)
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 9:14 AM Post #68 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by Cyrilix /img/forum/go_quote.gif
@Redo: Not necessarily. RAID functionality is integrated into many mainstream motherboards and Intel chipsets nowadays. Backup costs 2 x n, where n is the data you're trying to back up. RAID can cost anywhere up to 2 x n, but often cheaper. If you go for a really expensive solution, of course, it can be more expensive, but it doesn't have to be.

@HFat: That's right. Keep making fun of me and not addressing any of my points. I'm simply bringing anecdotal evidence to the table AND suggesting a potential alternative. If you have personally been shafted before (or if you've had a decent experience), I'd love to hear it. That would at least add more knowledge to the pool.

For reference, I use it for a media server, which is more than just music, however, if you just want to back up your music, it'll be a lot cheaper, so that's a plus for backup. For example, I have ~30 GB of music. It's trivial for me to find 30 GB of space, absolutely trivial, but to do this for all of my media would be expensive.




Outside of RAID-0, which costs high risk, every other RAID system costs extra disk space in one way or another. Backing up to a second hard drive will always be more cost effective than setting up a RAID array.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 9:18 AM Post #69 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by HFat /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I don't know that you've made a point that needs addressing. I just thinks it's funny to push RAID as something reliable on head-fi. As you can see, I'm easily amused.


I've had nothing but good experiences with RAID because I'm not using it to replace backups.
I'm currently using software RAID1 which stinks a whole lot less than proprietary hardware IMHO. For what that's worth, I also think that using RAID5 and such in small shops or at home nowadays is being penny wise and pound foolish.

The only way I've ever used RAID for backups is to avoid downtime by mirroring a system drive through RAID1... the reason I call it a backup is that, after syncing the array, the backup drive gets disconnected. I'm sure most OSs allow for a better way to do the same thing but this hack doesn't require reading so I like it. :)


@HFat: Fair enough. FWIW, I'm using Linux software RAID. Lets hope that I don't come back to this forum in tears.

@Redo: And backing up all of your media to another drive / set of drives does not take up extra disk space? I don't see what you're getting at here. At least HFat said "penny-wise, pound foolish", which in this context, is a far better interpretation than what you're implying, penny-wise because I'm trying to save money by skimping on disks, pound foolish because of potential disasters that I may meet as a result of this.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 9:22 AM Post #70 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by Redo /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Backing up to a second hard drive will always be more cost effective than setting up a RAID array.


I think he's talking about a situation where you've got too much data to fit in a reasonably priced drive... in which case it might indeed be cheaper to go RAID5 with one extra drive than to get two backup drives for example.

@Cyrilix: in my experience, Linux's RAID1 is solid. But RAID5 is another matter.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 9:29 AM Post #71 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by Cyrilix /img/forum/go_quote.gif
@Redo: And backing up all of your media to another drive / set of drives does not take up extra disk space? I don't see what you're getting at here. At least HFat said "penny-wise, pound foolish", which in this context, is a far better interpretation than what you're implying, penny-wise because I'm trying to save money by skimping on disks, pound foolish because of potential disasters that I may meet as a result of this.



If I setup a RAID-1 Array, lets say with two 250gb hard drives, I in effect have only 250gb of space. I've lost 250gb of storage space I could be using for other things.

If I setup a RAID-5 Array, with 4 250gb hard drives, I only have 750gb of space. 250gb of space is used for parity.

If I do not have any RAID setup, I can use 100% of my HD space for whatever I want. No HD space penalty.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 9:40 AM Post #72 of 79
For those of you who suggested RAID 5 - lets not forget the performance penalty of RAID 5 as opposed to RAID 1.

Nowadays the price of hard disk compared to a good RAID card is so loopsided that I feel getting 2 x 1TB hard disk + a hardware raid 1 card is a much better deal than getting 3 x 500GB hard disk + one good RAID card supporting raid 5.

However, I would suggest having an removeable harddisk running some kind of sync program with your music collection instead. That way, any sudden mistake with your music files does not get replicated with your backup copy.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 11:33 AM Post #73 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by HFat /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Jude trusts RAID and that's all we need to know about it. :wink:


And that sent the site offline for WEEKS. Granted, that was a (somewhat) rare catastrophic failure...But still.

NEVER trust just one means of backing something up.
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 11:43 AM Post #74 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by OverlordXenu /img/forum/go_quote.gif
And that sent the site offline for WEEKS.


Not to mention the broken links and the lingering misconfiguration. Am I the only one who still needs to refresh the pages manually?
 
Dec 23, 2007 at 12:06 PM Post #75 of 79
Quote:

Originally Posted by OverlordXenu /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Snip

NEVER trust just one means of backing something up.



QFT

RAID is not a backup. I wish people would stop calling it that. RAID and backup are two different things.

RAID attempts to prevent data loss and downtime in the case of a hardware failure.

Data backup is for the purposes of recovery in case of accidental or purposeful loss of data.

It is a simple question, which one do you want? If you want both, do both.
 
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