Best Raid with my hardware

[dilbert4life]

I have 4 1TB SATA hard drives. I want to do some data backup, so mirroring is a must. (You would want to backup too if you just spent $1500 on recovering data from a 750GB that you dropped which contained pretty much the only copy of all your work for the past 10 years. )

So, I am thinking, there are a couple options. Would you:

(btw - sorry, but I don't know the Raid numbering scheme.)

a. Create a Raid in which I do a stripe across 2 drives, and then mirror that, ending up with somewhere around 1.7 TB of space, but high band-width.

b. Create 2 separate mirrored raid disks sets.

c. (Insert your opinion here.)

Thanks all.

 

[davidwarren]

just do raid 5, you will be golden.

 

[dilbert4life]

just do raid 5, you will be golden.

I just wiki-ed it, and that sounds like the plan. It even gives for an example exactly what I wanted to do. Suppose I probably could have done that before.

As an example, four 1TB drives can be made into a 2 TB redundant array under RAID 1 or RAID 1+0, but the same four drives can be used to build a 3 TB array under RAID 5.

 

[davidwarren]

now the only thing to do is find a raid box! I would suggest a gigabit NAS.
edit- but they are not cheap.

 

[djellison]

But be aware, a Raid 5 array is tolerant to a single drive failing - but it's not tolerant to something corrupting that file system - so you still need a full backup elsewhere.