I keep seeing drives, such as Drobo. And when I looked at the price, I nearly died. Why the heck would you pay as much as that for a Machine that just put your Hard Drives together?
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Isn't RAID drives overpriced?
- Thread starter Power Macintosh
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Excuse me while I giggle.
6 Years of using HDD and not one crashed or failed. But of course, it isn't the same HDD. But heck, a failing HDD is just as rare as your house being struck by lightning.
^^
If you think you are 100% safe with just one HDD then you are deluding yourself...Wake up one morning, hit power and discover the drive is dead?
You don't have to spend $$$, just a USB drive in a caddy will suffice for backups, it's not fast, but your data is safe.
Running without backups? Not for me.
If you think you are 100% safe with just one HDD then you are deluding yourself...Wake up one morning, hit power and discover the drive is dead?
You don't have to spend $$$, just a USB drive in a caddy will suffice for backups, it's not fast, but your data is safe.
Running without backups? Not for me.
I too have never had a drive die on me but my mother's Seagate in her iMac gave up the ghost 6 months ago. Luckily she had a Time Capsule.
You can protect your data without using RAID. Having one or more backups stored in different locations will provide plenty of protection against data loss, without having to resort to RAID.
That is so incredibly UNTRUE.
A failing HD is not rare at all. Just because you haven't had one fail doesn't mean that it's a rare occurrence.
Wow.
Exactly, RAID is not backup.
It's more like, "How much is all your data in one place worth to you?", that is one of the main benefits of RAID, the other is the ability to keep on going with 1 or 2 drives failing.
The price for most of those boxes is also convenience, you only push in hard drives and the box does everything for you, otherwise you would need to install an OS, configure the raid and filesystem and then do whatever it is that needs to be done when a drive fails.
If you don't want to spend on a raid box and have the time to do it yourself, i'd recommend having a look at ZFS and raid-z, raid-z2, raid-z3.
Although you also lose the ability to grow easily with ZFS, but you gain a failsafe to bit-rot
RAIDs run faster and have an inherent backup strategy.
For speed and peace of mind, the price is fair.
I've had many hard drives die over the last six years. I think at least 4 or 5. So no, not as rare as my house being struck by lightening.
Yes they are faster (depending on configuration). No, they are not backup.
Even just thinking of them as backup is likely to lead someone into making the wrong decisions about a viable backup strategy. RAID is not backup (repeat as necessary till it sinks in).
/Jim
That post is way off the mark. You are giggling based on your vast 6 years of experience?
Unfortunately hard drive failure is much more common than you believe. Google published a study a few years back based on their observations of 100,000 mechanical enterprise drives. There was another study that same year that reached the same conclusions. Both were equally scary from a data preservation perspective.
You seem to be under the impression that mechanical failure is the only cause of data loss. While you have been lucky, they all die eventually. You don't actually need a raid for backups. Raids can crash too. if you use a Raid for storage, you still need to back it up. I don't care for Drobo personally, but backups do give you some amount of increased reliability. There are plenty of people like you who complain on forums when they do eventually encounter a problem and lose important data.
Drobo annoys me in a lot of ways. It's not fun to deal with them. Post sales support is a frequent complaint.
I find these are fairly priced:
http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=210
No thunderbolt though.
http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=210
No thunderbolt though.
And what would call a RAID 1 for example? You have say, 2 HDs, that have duplicated data on them. If one goes out (either the other RAID HD or the original) you still have the other RAID HD with data on it. That's back up.
or say the enclosure fails and kills both disks in the process,
or there's a power spike and both disks fry...
That's f---ed.
or the RAID controller gets screwey and corrupts the data.
or ...
or ...
or ...
RAID can be protection from disk failure, but not a complete backup solution.
It will get you up and running faster after a failure, but you still need another copy physically separated from the original. how far depends on how valuable the data is to you.
It is not back up. If there is data corruption (either programmatic or user initiated)... then both copies of your data are corrupted.
Backup allows you to restore to an earlier version of your data. Good backup lets you turn back the clock in convenient increments to the beginning of time.
By contrast, RAID 1 helps protect against device failure... specifically, against a single HDD failure. There are many other failure mechanisms beyond a single HDD failure. RAID 1 could be thought of as a "more reliable disk"... but it is not backup... nor is it necessarily extremely reliable.
/Jim
That is not N+1. Proper backup protocol requires redundancy, not just on the data itself, but the backups of that data. A single backup location, even if it has multiple drives in RAID 1, is just as terrible as no backup at all.
Power Macintosh: Hard drives get increased failure rates past the 3rd year. Sure, none of your drives failed in 6 years, but it could simply be you got lucky on the dice.