By Philip Churchill on December 28th, 2010
Understanding RAID
With RAID being an ideal solution for windows Home Server Vail it may be worth your while having a read of the Understanding RAID guide courtesy of bit.tech.net.
It may be an old guide but it is still relevant and is also a good read for understanding the RAID technology and the different version of RAID which are available to you.
Understanding RAID is available to read here.
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RAID has been around for a very LONG time. It requires constant maintenance and a lot of time to setup. As a WHS solution it is a disaster waiting to happen. Everybody writing about RAID has never tried to use it in a real world situation. Blow a disk, or any hardware and you can kiss your data goodbye. recovery takes days. Yes I know it’s supposed to provide redundancy but if you believe that try raid for a few months. You will regret every getting involved.
@Jim
Utterly agree – RAID is not a technology for home. Spikes in power, crashes, unexpected disk spindowns. Heck, even a change in wind direction will knock out the array and trigger a rebuild (if you’re lucky) or data loss (if not). I’ve lost a lot of hair and days (probably weeks) of time doing RAID recovery.
DE works well as a consumer tech. I for one would like a Vail DE power pack with a few changes to WHS1 DE:
1. Configurable balancing – priority and frequency (put this on an advanced tab) … priority (to stop it trashing streaming) and frequency to trigger it daily for the same reason.
2. CRC Resilience per Vail preview – for me the 14% (or whatever it was) hit in storage was worth it to have recoverable data.
“With RAID being an ideal solution for windows Home Server Vail”
Says who?
Personally, I would much rather see some kind of scheduled automated backup of the server than RAID any day.