If you have company data or even if you’re a home user who just has a lot of family pictures that you don’t want to loose – you should always have some sort of backup solution in case of a hardware failure or another type of situation where your data could be in jeopardy.
There are various ways to go about doing this through both software and hardware. I won’t go deep into the software part in this article however I would like to address the hardware aspect of those setups.
Mirror (RAID1) – This is the first system that you should consider if you’re thinking about a “care-free” internal backup. Mirror, which is technically referred to as RAID1 does exactly what it sounds like – it mirrors your data between 2 drives using a piece of hardware referred to as a controller. Some motherboards have this piece of hardware actually built into them, others require an additional card. When choosing whether to go with a separate card or a built-in controller, consider the ups and downs of both.
The built-in controller is usually more user friendly in the same price range as a separate card (I’m comparing built-in controllers on ASUS boards with Adaptec separate cards) and also when you use it you don’t have to think about hardware conflicts between it and other drive controllers that may be present on the board. However if so happens that your board dies, even though you would have the 2 copies of your data, system recovery will be more difficult. The reason for this is that Windows contains drivers of the controller that it boots from and when put on a different controller it may or may not boot.
On a separate controller that issue can by-passed and if the hardware between your dead machine and your new machine is similar enough – the OS may boot. (Keep in mind that if you had the old machine installed on an AMD Athlon XP 1800 and now moved it to an Intel Core 2 Duo – more software modifications/repairs will have to be done for the OS to boot because the configurations are so different.) Another benefit to a separate controller is that you can have a choice of brands. We recommend Adaptec due to their quality. Also a separate controller can provide additional features that are not available on-board with the price range of the board that you might be looking for.
As for the drives that should be used in a RAID – timing and quality is critical to maintain synchronization between the drives. That is why we recommend using West Digital’s 10,000RPM SATA drives. RAID will work on 7200RPM drives, however if a lot of stress, such as a SQL database or Microsoft Exchange, will be applied to them there is a very high chance of the drives becoming inconsistent or even failing in certain cases.
So the 2 main things to remember when you are getting a RAID system:
On-board controller VS a separate controller card
and
Use the highest quality hard drives - West Digital 10,000RPM drives