Onboard RAID 1 with WD Blue a viable option for htpc?

[OCMusicJunkie]

Hey guys. Hoping to get some feedback here where I know the general quality of the responses. The info I find via google is conflicting and I have no idea who it is giving their input.

I have an HTPC that uses a M5A88-M mobo, which incorporates a SB850 SATA controller. I have a WD10EZEX (1tb caviar blue) drive that holds all of my media files that I'd rather not have to replace, but which are not important enough to fully include in my backup routine. I was thinking about using the empty identical drive in the system to create a RAID 1 mirror setup so that a single disk failure won't mean replacing all of the movies and music files.

However, WD cautions against using the Blue drives in RAID environments. It seems like the majority of people would say this wouldn't apply to a simple RAID 0 or RAID 1 array because the TLER feature isn't critical as with other array types. Would like to know if there is any other reasons to avoid this model drive for this application. Secondly, there is a lot of mixed feelings on "fake" onboard raid setups, but mostly from people looking for performance from a RAID 0 configuration. I don't need speed, just an edge in reliabillity over a single drive. Am I just adding another moving part that's going to cause problems down the road if I do this?

 

[Automata]

TLER has nothing to do with the RAID level. It has to do with the RAID controller itself.

TLER allows a drive to fix read errors up to a certain time limit. On consumer level drives, this is set to 90 seconds (enterprise and Red drives are 7). If your controller drops drives after a certain amount of time, then TLER could cause an issue. On board RAID generally waits for a missing drive forever, so it usually isn't an issue. Hardware RAID controllers will drop hard drives, so that would be a bad idea.

Is RAID 1 what you really need though? It will only protect you against hardware faults. If you were to delete a file or it becomes corrupt through software, you are going to lose the data. If you just need a backup of certain files, you could setup a scheduled task to make backups. That would allow you time to restore should something go wrong.

 

[OCMusicJunkie]

You make a good point about a corrupt file system not being protected against. Since I multi-boot my other systems, there is a chance that eventually the data would end up in a linux environment, and I've had a few hiccups in the past with such. Maybe on further thought I should just be looking into a lightweight, simple program that would backup my units across the network to one another?

 

[Automata]

There are many ways you can synchronize folders across a network, but I've found that installing rsync through Cygwin is the fastest for me. I had scripts already written to backup to a rsync server, so carrying that over to Windows was very easy.

 

[neonblingbling]

Late to the party, but what about making a copy of the files to an external drive? They're pretty cheap on sale (4TB for $140), and are also very portable.

 

[OCMusicJunkie]

Late to the party, but what about making a copy of the files to an external drive? They're pretty cheap on sale (4TB for $140), and are also very portable.

Well, that is something I've thought about doing just as with my o' ther data, but the issue there is that I'm really concerned about what I do whenever the HTPC's disk does fail from either bad luck or just old age- and having to move a terabyte of data all at once from a USB 2.0 device back onto the system would take an estimated 84 hours if my math is right. If I were to use a regular SATA drive inside of an enclosure, that may very well be what I end up doing, although I wonder how durable such a "homemade" portable drive would be over time.

For now, ended up moving all of my disks to one machine for a day and used Reflect to create an image the HTPC drive inside of my other two machines and vice-versa, so everything is reasonably safe so long as I still have one system here. Don't think I plan on using that technique for incremental future backups though.