Which Raid to use

[cableguy619]

I currently have 4 Terabytes of brand new HD space to use and plan on adding additional drives in the near future. I would like to be able to back up my photos and data for the main purpose of backing up.

What would you suggest as a raid setup should I use? I was thinking RAID , but would I be able to add additional drives in the future without having to lose any data?

Any help and advice would be great.

 

[Panch0]

RAID is not Backup. The R is for Redundant; RAID protects you from a hardware failure, but not from things like accidental deletion.

A RAID volume can be a good target for a backup system such as Time Machine, but RAID is not itself a backup.

That said, you didn't include the RAID type you were considering in your post...

RAID 0 - increased performance bit increased risk (you actually have a higher chance of data loss)

RAID 1 - same performance as a single drive (maybe slightly lower performance), but you are protected from a single drive failure. Half of available space is lost to redundancy

RAID 5 - good balance between performance and protection, but you need either a dedicated enclosure or a dedicated RAID Controller. This is a very commonly used RAID Level in NAS devices. You can often expand a RAID 5 volume without loosing data, but it depends on the controller or NAS you are using.

Best guess from your post is that you have 4 1 TB drives and are considering RAID 5 in an external enclosure - maybe connected via FW800. That would be a good target system for backup software like Time Machine, or for a cloning strategy using software like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper.

Can't really do much better than that based on the info in your post. Just remember that RAID by itself does not a backup make!

 

[cableguy619]

RAID is not Backup. The R is for Redundant; RAID protects you from a hardware failure, but not from things like accidental deletion.

A RAID volume can be a good target for a backup system such as Time Machine, but RAID is not itself a backup.

That said, you didn't include the RAID type you were considering in your post...

RAID 0 - increased performance bit increased risk (you actually have a higher chance of data loss)

RAID 1 - same performance as a single drive (maybe slightly lower performance), but you are protected from a single drive failure. Half of available space is lost to redundancy

RAID 5 - good balance between performance and protection, but you need either a dedicated enclosure or a dedicated RAID Controller. This is a very commonly used RAID Level in NAS devices. You can often expand a RAID 5 volume without loosing data, but it depends on the controller or NAS you are using.

Best guess from your post is that you have 4 1 TB drives and are considering RAID 5 in an external enclosure - maybe connected via FW800. That would be a good target system for backup software like Time Machine, or for a cloning strategy using software like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper.

Can't really do much better than that based on the info in your post. Just remember that RAID by itself does not a backup make!

opps man I am all drugged up and not makign much sense, but I meant to say I was considering raid 5 and you hit what I was lookign for Pancho thanks