Basic Raid-1 question

HW_HackHW_Hack North of Kalifornia
edited August 2007 in Hardware
I need to build a basic file server (Win2000) that has a high level of recovery / redunancy when it comes to the data and the up-time. It also needs to be fairly cheap ( I work in a school system).

So I've come down to Raid-1 --- my desire would be to mirror the OS and the data files so that should the primary drive crash we just put a new drive in -- auto re-build and we're back in action.

Am I thinking correctly here ?? I've heard there are some issues / concerns in having the booting OS as part of the array.

This will be a HW Raid solution using a PCI Raid card and two 250GB drives. I could go to a separate HD for the OS - but now I have to be able to rebuild an OS drive should that croak.

I read thru the RAID section but this scenario wasn't covered

Thanks

Comments

  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited August 2007
    For even better security, you could move to RAID 5 with four hard drives. HDDs are very inexpensive. Sure your budget wouldn't allow for that? That's even better redundancy. Before someone laughs at me: I haven't worked with RAID in a while, but think that I probably know what I'm talking about. (I'm preparing a graceful mea culpa.)

    Your RAID 1 proposition appears valid to me. Something to consider would be a RAID 1 plus a third, external drive, to which you do an incremental backup daily.
  • HW_HackHW_Hack North of Kalifornia
    edited August 2007
    Leonardo -

    Thanks for the feed back - Raid-5 is no doubt a more efficient / elegant solution but that means not just 2 more HDs but extra $$ for a "real" raid card .... meaning one that can actually do all the parity calcs etc.

    I'm looking at one of the sub $100 cards that really just handle Raid 0/1 - I know some of these cards claim Raid 5 but (I'm told) the CPU gets hammered doing the parity work.

    Good to hear you think my plan to mirror OS + data seems ok - and yes a third drive is needed for backup as well
    :)
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited August 2007
    You've got a good point concerning CPU utilization and amateur quality RAID cards. I don't know the hardware solutions (dedicated RAID cards) very well. I'm sure someone will chime in. Most computers, even AMD 64 single core and P4 Netburst don't operate at anywhere near capacity most of the time. The computer/server which you wish to employ as a RAID box - does it have extraordinary demands on the CPU? Bet it doesn't.
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