Quake3World

If I am going to set up a raid to mirror my main drive for backup, do I need to have a motherboard that will do raid or are there programs so it doesnt matter about the motherboard?

you can run software raid on most modern oses, linux being very simple configuration
However, you'll lose performance. For the best performance, reliability, etc. you'll need either a raid-capable mobo or add-in card.

Thank you

I recently set up a hardware SATA RAID1 mirror, was easy as using nVidia's RAID config utility. Most motherboards these days that arent super-budget have RAID0 or 1, and in my experience it's easier than you think to set one up.

corpse wrote:If I am going to set up a raid to mirror my main drive for backup, do I need to have a motherboard that will do raid or are there programs so it doesnt matter about the motherboard?

Keep in mind that a mirror is not a backup. The OS will write to both drives at the same time, so if one drive dies Windows will still work but you should perform regular backups in addition to this.

But as far as drive failure goes, it's a backup is it not? As you can rebuild the mirror from one drive, if the other fails.
For accidental deletions and viruses it's not a proper backup though, but the only data loss i've ever had has been due to hard drive failure.
Thoughts torm?

Tormentius wrote:Mirroring adds fault tolerance in the way that if one drive dies no data is lost, but that can't be properly described as a backup. I just wanted to make sure that was clear to Corpse since that distinction being misunderstood could potentially cause lost data later on.

I see your point now. Because if, for example, you screw something up on your windows installation and render it unbootable - Then your RAID mirror won't function as a backup allowing you to carry on working.

In that sense it is distinct from a backup solution.

Good point, foo--another reason why software raid is a fallacy in the sense of true redundancy.

If you're talking hardware raid, as long as you're not swapping a pre-built array of disks between different hardware or a hardware bos/bios level, you should be able to recover your data.

Ok, cool stuff. Wanted to make sure of that, being that I spent around £100 on a 250GB mirror system with the primary motive being a "backup".

Thanks for the further info