Two Drive RAID Systems

[dataman]

Hard Drive companies like Western Digital, Lacie, Iomega, and Maxtor are selling two drive RAID externals with RAID 0 as the default configuration. RAID 0 means spanning two drives of equal size into one large drive. RAID 0 gives clients false sense of security. When clients hear the term RAID they associate it with redundancy. The truth is that RAID 0 leaves you much more at risk than having your data on one hard drive. The reason is that in a RAID 0 configuration your data is stripped across both drives. When one drive goes down then you have essentially lost all of your data. RAID 1 or JBOD is the only way to go with these two hard drive RAID systems.

JBOD also spans two hard drives into one large partition. JBOD allows you to use different sized hard drives to create the one large volume. JBOD offers zero redundancy.

RAID 1 mirrors data to both of the hard drives. That equals built in redundancy. This is the obvious choice over RAID 0 or JBOD simply because of redundancy. You will sacrifice some drive capacity for peace of mind. RAID 1 is typically not a standard configuration by hard drive manufacturers. This means when buying a 2 drive RAID set it would be wise to take the time to reconfigure the RAID for mirroring.

The next time you go to buy an external two drive RAID system be certain that you have redundancy. That means either change the default configuration to RAID 1 or have a backup system for your RAID.

[scratchy]

Just thought I would add this in case someone misunderstands your point....

RAID 1 is all well and good, but it is not a backup system.

When you have a logical problem on drive 0, this gets transferred to drive 1 meaning both copies of the data are now corrupt.

The purpose of having RAID 1 is so that if a drive fails, the computer keeps running.. Perfect for Web servers, email servers, etc. It is not an alternative to backup.