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View Full Version : Feedback? RAID 0 + Nightly SuperDuper Clone


xylonets
10-08-2007, 06:46 PM
I'm in the process of reconfiguring my hard drives + backup configuration and wanted to see if I could get any feedback on a particular configuration that I *believe* is promising.

First of all, I have a PowerMac G5 and 4 500GB SATA drives. 2 Drives internal and 2 Drives external housed in Icy Dock enclosures and connected via a Firmtek PCIe SATA adapter. My initial test of a RAID 0 on the external disks indicated a roughly 33% increase in speed reading and writing. I knew RAID 0 was fast but this is really fast! With that said, I'm painfully aware that RAID 0 can be a dangerous configuration to run as either drive failing kills the RAID. But honestly I'm not willing to take the performance hit that would come with a RAID 1 and it seems to me that losing a non-raided drive, be it the boot drive or data drive is why we are all using apps like SuperDrive in the first place--reliable backups are the only proof against drive failure. I know several sysadmins that don't even trust RAID 5 for that matter.

The configuration I'm asking for feedback on is pretty simple...
Internal: 2 Drives RAID 0
External: 2 Drives RAID 0
Nightly SuperDuper Clone of internal to external.

Throw in 2 more drives and I'll do monthly offsite rotations too.

What do you think? Is this wise or not? Any comments or other ideas are welcome.

Thanks!

dnanian
10-08-2007, 07:04 PM
Personally, I'm willing to give up speed -- especially on a backup set -- for more reliability, and wouldn't use RAID0 as a backup destination.

xylonets
10-08-2007, 07:44 PM
So you wouldn't run RAID 0 as the backup drive but otherwise you would run it as the system drive?

dnanian
10-08-2007, 07:57 PM
Well, I wouldn't run RAID 0 as a system drive either, but if you're going to take that risk I'd endeavor to be more redundant on the backup.