"and RAID arrays are

Submitted by MaxFan on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 7:53am

"and RAID arrays are susceptible to motherboard problems too—the last thing you want is a BIOS update destroying your data."

This is true ONLY if you built the array at the OS level (aka softraid or fakeraid).  If the controller you are using (more and more motherboard manufacturers are going with chips that actually implement hardware raid and the price of discrete SATA RAID controller cards riding the PCIe Bus has dropped dramatacially thus making this more and more common) allows block level control over the stripe set then its a true raid and unless you bork the RAID Controller while the Array is in a degraded state you are not apt to lose data even in RAID 0.  I still recommend RAID 1+0 or RAID 5 for redundancy sake but programs and settings and the OS on a RAID 0 Volume is fine.  Just dont write to the RAID 0 that which you do not have a cd or exe for.  Ive even recovered data off of a stripe set (RAID 0) after attempting to load Win 7 RC and kubuntu server and getting the grub error 21 and losing the entire MBR, just by using the Win 7 dvd to repair the MBR at the command line interface.  Yeah I had to rewrite the bootsect and MBR on the stripe but whatever, data was just fine after that. 

 

 

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Meh... Everything on my

Submitted by horzo on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 4:07pm

Meh...

Everything on my primary box is in a RAID0. Run nightly backups of your important files and stop worrying about it.

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Sometimes but not often..

Submitted by rseding91 on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 3:14pm

I currently have a RAID 0 setup my self and I install all my programs on it. I did recently do a BIOS update which reset all my custom options in the CMOS (RAID included). However it was not a disaster because all I had to do was go into CMOS and tell my SATA controller to run in RAID again, it then scanned and found the RAID 0 and has been working fine ever sense.

I have only ever seen a RAID 0 fail twice - in a laptop. Both times 95% of the data was recoverable useing a bootable windows environment and a special peice of software to reconstruct the RAID.

So just keep that in mind - even if the RAID does fail you might still be able to recover some data.

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get it right

Submitted by Shckr57 on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 2:24pm

i bought 2 wd velociraptors (300GB apiece), put them in raid 0, then installed all my games, antivirus, os, ........... anything that you just install from a cd or exe. Now, with all 95GB of music and 35GB of videos, if your raid setup fails, you just lost all than vital info that you cant just reinstall from a cd. Also with all my iso, i put them on my backup hdd. who feels like downloading 200 GB worth of stuff, and not just that, but trying to remember it all.

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