RAID or similar fault tolerance system

[NameSniper]

Hello,

I am about to buy a new PC and I have chose all components except HDD/storage.
My concern is the potential failure of HDD.
I would like to have as accurate copy of my HDD at any given time as possible.
I have narrowed my search to RAID 1 or some kind of incremental backup solution like NAT.
Considering that my budget for storage is maximum $300, what kind of solution you may advice me considering my requirements listed below?
1)It should be reliable and in case my primary HDD fails I should eb able to restore my data to new HDD
2)Backup solution shouldnt decrease my HDD and overall PC performance
3)It should exceed mentioned budget

At the moment I am considering RAID 1 as a primary solution.

[I.M.O.G.]

Hey bud, :welcome:!

Your post was caught by our spam filter - I just manually approved it. Someone should be by to help you soon!

[thideras]

What type of system are you looking for? You mention RAID and backups, which are not the same thing.

RAID:
Either RAID1 or RAID5. RAID1 is mirroring; you write to both/read drives at the same time. RAID5 is striping with parity, you write/read all drives at the same time. They key here is one drive can fail and the RAID array is still valid, no data is lost. There are a couple down-sides to this. If you delete a file or a file is corrupted, it is reflected on all drives simultaneously and the data is lost. The cost is also slightly higher. With more complex setups, you will want to invest in a good RAID card to offload parity calculations and greatly speed up the array. This also gives the add benefit if the motherboard fails, you can literally drop the card and hard drives into another computer with zero setup or data loss. If you are using the onboard RAID, there is a chance that the motherboard fails or the array goes into an "offline" state. Without backup, you run a high risk of catastrophic data loss; so I wouldn't suggest any of the onboard "solutions".

Backup:
A cheaper option to RAID. You can use another internal or external drive to backup what you want to keep. You can also "stage" backups. What I mean by this is you can have it backup weekly with the date on it, keeping a series of backups in case you deleted a file a few weeks back and need it. Depending on how often you backup, data can be lost if a single drive fails, but it usually wouldn't be a catastrophic failure (complete data loss). You could also move the backups between systems easily.

Personally, I run a mixture of both. The RAID is run on the file server which is used as storage/backup. While this is a better solution than RAID on the desktop computer, the cost is substantially higher (another computer, etc). It also gives more freedoms, but I don't think you are interested in a file server.

[NameSniper]

Sorry for the late reply, but it has took a lot of time to move all my files and programs to new PC.

Hey bud, :welcome:!

Your post was caught by our spam filter - I just manually approved it. Someone should be by to help you soon!
Thanks :)

What type of system are you looking for? You mention RAID and backups, which are not the same thing.

RAID:
Either RAID1 or RAID5. RAID1 is mirroring; you write to both/read drives at the same time. RAID5 is striping with parity, you write/read all drives at the same time. They key here is one drive can fail and the RAID array is still valid, no data is lost. There are a couple down-sides to this. If you delete a file or a file is corrupted, it is reflected on all drives simultaneously and the data is lost. The cost is also slightly higher. With more complex setups, you will want to invest in a good RAID card to offload parity calculations and greatly speed up the array. This also gives the add benefit if the motherboard fails, you can literally drop the card and hard drives into another computer with zero setup or data loss. If you are using the onboard RAID, there is a chance that the motherboard fails or the array goes into an "offline" state. Without backup, you run a high risk of catastrophic data loss; so I wouldn't suggest any of the onboard "solutions".

Backup:
A cheaper option to RAID. You can use another internal or external drive to backup what you want to keep. You can also "stage" backups. What I mean by this is you can have it backup weekly with the date on it, keeping a series of backups in case you deleted a file a few weeks back and need it. Depending on how often you backup, data can be lost if a single drive fails, but it usually wouldn't be a catastrophic failure (complete data loss). You could also move the backups between systems easily.

Personally, I run a mixture of both. The RAID is run on the file server which is used as storage/backup. While this is a better solution than RAID on the desktop computer, the cost is substantially higher (another computer, etc). It also gives more freedoms, but I don't think you are interested in a file server.
Thanks for reply.
I have decided to go with the backup option. I am looking for incremental backup software now.

[tachi1247]

As thideras indicated, running both is actually the way to go if you really need to keep your data. Running just RAID means if something gets erased or corrupted it's gone for good as both copies will be screwed up.

It goes without saying that you need to have your back-up on a different drive than your data, but even back-up files can get corrupted. This exact situation actually happened to my friend. He lost power at his house momentarily and it caused the computer to lose power but not long enough for it to completely turn off. This caused his main hdd to start & stop which fried the disk and just his luck, his back-up file got corrupted some how so he lost everything.

hard drives are so cheap now that I look at it as a required cost to keep my data safe. for $200 you can easily get (2) 1 TB hard drives to run raid 1 and then get another smaller drive to back-up your data to. you don't have to back-up your windows install etc as you can always get that and all the other programs back easily.

[||Console||]

Once I have some spare cash I will be building a MHS ( Microsoft home server ) It uses software raid and can be setup to back all the PC's in your house .