Disk mirroring advice

[Petester]

Ahoy matey's

I need to do a build for a client.
He wants his drives mirrored . Just two. No redundancy.

This is fine but I'm unsure if I should use NVMe or SATA SSD's or even just stick to HDD's.
Some boards don't mention RAID 1 on the NVMe's if the board has two or more but do on the SATA ports.

The other consideration is endurance but I have found some high endurance NVMe SSD's that aren't too costly.
I'm just concerned about mirroring NVMe SSD's and don't want to waste money on a Mobo and then it doesn't work.

Rest of the specs of the PC are going to be very basic, as its basically a file server, but basic boards tend to not have 2 NVMe slots and ones that do, don't document whether they support RAID 1 aka mirroring.

 

[Oops!!!]

He wants his drives mirrored . Just two. No redundancy.

running raid1 would be mean there is redundancy with 1 drive though?

 

[SomeoneOnCarbonite]

Mirroring would shorten the life of the ssd's I would think. And as the above point says, mirroring implies redundancy.

If you're just mirroring the data, normal mechanical drives would suffice. Run the OS on the faster drive.

 

[Petester]

running raid1 would be mean there is redundancy with 1 drive though?

Mirroring would shorten the life of the ssd's I would think. And as the above point says, mirroring implies redundancy.

If you're just mirroring the data, normal mechanical drives would suffice. Run the OS on the faster drive.

Thanks guys . Yes of course there is redundancy. Was thinking of three or more . The SSD's have 1800 TBW lifespan so pretty high. Hard drives have no finite life like an SSD but are of course more unreliable. He wants the whole drive mirrored so O/S included

 

[SomeoneOnCarbonite]

Are you going to do a hardware raid?

 

[Petester]

Are you going to do a hardware raid?

That was the plan. I'm no expert on RAID hence the thread
EDIT: Seems I'm doing a software RAID

 

[souljazk]

Q1. Is there any critical data involved?
2. Is this a mission critical system?
3. What is he wanting to accomplish with RAID? Sounds like he wants some surety that there is a duplicate of his data. If so, I'd skip RAID and use an external drive or small NAS or compress password & upload to Gdrive etc.
4. How does he intend to physically store them?
5. How long does he hope the drives will last? 10y? longer?

To the best of my knowledge for long term storage, mechanical or tape is still what the data points to as being the most reliable choice. Obv not all disks/tapes are made equal, but you get the point.

I could be wrong. I'm no RAID expert but I can tell you this:

1. IF the client is serious about a reliable backup AND management of the RAID platform & restores (which is the point, right?) then get a dedicated RAID card pair. If a single card fails, the client might cry at the "new" cost of that card in 3-5years or >.

2. Software RAID has shown to be less reliable as a rule of thumb. (e.g. RAID included in 90% of consumer/enthusiast mobo's)

 

[PandaAttack1]

Thanks guys . Yes of course there is redundancy. Was thinking of three or more . The SSD's have 1800 TBW lifespan so pretty high. Hard drives have no finite life like an SSD but are of course more unreliable. He wants the whole drive mirrored so O/S included

I did not realise hard drives are considered to be more unreliable than SSDs. The more you know.

 

[solz]

Depending how you drive is setup you could just do a mirror withing windows if it's windows based, then it boots up from one nvme/ssd/drive or just setup with software to do mirror in windows.

I have used raid 1 on ssd and has not killed them would really depend what you use them for.
So raid 1 mean it could read from any of the two and system would continue working when one is gone there is no extra magic that they do that would kill the drives. It's just both slowly die together at similar rate.

 

[Petester]

Depending how you drive is setup you could just do a mirror withing windows if it's windows based, then it boots up from one nvme/ssd/drive or just setup with software to do mirror in windows.

I have used raid 1 on ssd and has not killed them would really depend what you use them for.
So raid 1 mean it could read from any of the two and system would continue working when one is gone there is no extra magic that they do that would kill the drives. It's just both slowly die together at similar rate.

Yes I want to keep it simple and it will be in windows 10 or 11 Pro. Dying slowly is good

 

[Petester]

Q1. Is there any critical data involved?
2. Is this a mission critical system?
3. What is he wanting to accomplish with RAID? Sounds like he wants some surety that there is a duplicate of his data. If so, I'd skip RAID and use an external drive or small NAS or compress password & upload to Gdrive etc.
4. How does he intend to physically store them?
5. How long does he hope the drives will last? 10y? longer?

To the best of my knowledge for long term storage, mechanical or tape is still what the data points to as being the most reliable choice. Obv not all disks/tapes are made equal, but you get the point.

I could be wrong. I'm no RAID expert but I can tell you this:

1. IF the client is serious about a reliable backup AND management of the RAID platform & restores (which is the point, right?) then get a dedicated RAID card pair. If a single card fails, the client might cry at the "new" cost of that card in 3-5years or >.

2. Software RAID has shown to be less reliable as a rule of thumb. (e.g. RAID included in 90% of consumer/enthusiast mobo's)

Thanks for that . I guess software RAID is probably what I am going to do as his budget is pretty limited. Just unsure if I should go NVME M.2 SSD or SATA SSD or SATA HDD. No idea what his file server is for but he said whole drive must be mirrored

 

[Oj0]

Hard drives have no finite life like an SSD but are of course more unreliable

That's debatable. Most HDDs can handle multiple PB being written to them over their life and don't "wear out" as such. Mechanical drives often tend to show signs of impending doom before dying, while SSDs often just quit life in an instant.

That said, unless 24/7 uptime is the goal, RAID is not the ideal solution.

RAID 1 will not protect against accidental deletion
RAID 1 will not protect against file system corruption
RAID 1 will not protect against ransomware
RAID 1 will not protect against controller failure

If he wants 24/7 uptime, RAID 1 with drives from different vendors or AT LEAST from different batches is generally the way to go about it (to avoid two drives from a bad batch dying at the same time). If he wants data security, forget the entire RAID idea and implement a backup system for him.

Regardless of the above, implement a backup system for him.

 

[SomeoneOnCarbonite]

Depending how you drive is setup you could just do a mirror withing windows if it's windows based, then it boots up from one nvme/ssd/drive or just setup with software to do mirror in windows.

I have used raid 1 on ssd and has not killed them would really depend what you use them for.
So raid 1 mean it could read from any of the two and system would continue working when one is gone there is no extra magic that they do that would kill the drives. It's just both slowly die together at similar rate.

In a perfect world, the write speed is the same as writing to one drive, but read is double. It doesn't read from "any" drive, it splits the reads between the two, to attain the benefit of increased read speeds (as the data is exactly the same on both, this is possible to read like that)

 

[Byakugan]

You sure you dont mean Raid 1 with no hot spare? Cause Raid1 is mirroring with redundancy.
If he doesn't care about redundancy than setup Raid0 as that spreads.

He must just make sure the data gets backed up.

 

[Petester]

That's debatable. Most HDDs can handle multiple PB being written to them over their life and don't "wear out" as such. Mechanical drives often tend to show signs of impending doom before dying, while SSDs often just quit life in an instant.

That said, unless 24/7 uptime is the goal, RAID is not the ideal solution.

RAID 1 will not protect against accidental deletion
RAID 1 will not protect against file system corruption
RAID 1 will not protect against ransomware
RAID 1 will not protect against controller failure

If he wants 24/7 uptime, RAID 1 with drives from different vendors or AT LEAST from different batches is generally the way to go about it (to avoid two drives from a bad batch dying at the same time). If he wants data security, forget the entire RAID idea and implement a backup system for him.

Regardless of the above, implement a backup system for him.

Thanks he wants 24/7 uptime. I am no expert in RAID or backup. I have purposely avoided those over the years and don't plan to start now . haha. Just do what he wants me to do and he can figure out the rest.

 

[SomeoneOnCarbonite]

Q1. Is there any critical data involved?
2. Is this a mission critical system?
3. What is he wanting to accomplish with RAID? Sounds like he wants some surety that there is a duplicate of his data. If so, I'd skip RAID and use an external drive or small NAS or compress password & upload to Gdrive etc.
4. How does he intend to physically store them?
5. How long does he hope the drives will last? 10y? longer?

To the best of my knowledge for long term storage, mechanical or tape is still what the data points to as being the most reliable choice. Obv not all disks/tapes are made equal, but you get the point.

I could be wrong. I'm no RAID expert but I can tell you this:

1. IF the client is serious about a reliable backup AND management of the RAID platform & restores (which is the point, right?) then get a dedicated RAID card pair. If a single card fails, the client might cry at the "new" cost of that card in 3-5years or >.

2. Software RAID has shown to be less reliable as a rule of thumb. (e.g. RAID included in 90% of consumer/enthusiast mobo's)

Good questions. I think you need to get more information from the client as to what he's trying to achieve.

 

[Petester]

You sure you dont mean Raid 1 with no hot spare? Cause Raid1 is mirroring with redundancy.
If he doesn't care about redundancy than setup Raid0 as that spreads.

He must just make sure the data gets backed up.

He wants a simple mirror of 2 drives. So yes Raid 1 and yes there is redundancy as i erroneously left out in my original post

 

[SomeoneOnCarbonite]

Thanks he wants 24/7 uptime. I am no expert in RAID or backup. I have purposely avoided those over the years and don't plan to start now . haha. Just do what he wants me to do and he can figure out the rest.

He's going to come back to you when things go wrong 😁 it might not be your problem now but it will be then! 😂

 

[solz]

Q1. Is there any critical data involved?
2. Is this a mission critical system?
3. What is he wanting to accomplish with RAID? Sounds like he wants some surety that there is a duplicate of his data. If so, I'd skip RAID and use an external drive or small NAS or compress password & upload to Gdrive etc.
4. How does he intend to physically store them?
5. How long does he hope the drives will last? 10y? longer?

To the best of my knowledge for long term storage, mechanical or tape is still what the data points to as being the most reliable choice. Obv not all disks/tapes are made equal, but you get the point.

I could be wrong. I'm no RAID expert but I can tell you this:

1. IF the client is serious about a reliable backup AND management of the RAID platform & restores (which is the point, right?) then get a dedicated RAID card pair. If a single card fails, the client might cry at the "new" cost of that card in 3-5years or >.

2. Software RAID has shown to be less reliable as a rule of thumb. (e.g. RAID included in 90% of consumer/enthusiast mobo's)

People have to remember raid is not a backup its just a protection mechanism to help when you have hardware failure.

Don't think software raid is as unreliable as hardware raid from external cards as it's implemented on server hardware also making use of the same software available for desktop grade hardware. The catch is hardware raid is managed by the addon card and not by the cpu and it tends to have battery backup option to minimize data loss to allow the card to keep the cached data and complete once drives are back online.

 

[Petester]

He's going to come back to you when things go wrong 😁 it might not be your problem now but it will be then! 😂

No its not really like that. I know the client well. His budget is also low so his expectations are not that high either . Wants me to do something on the cheap and a simple mirror might be the best

 

[souljazk]

Depending how you drive is setup you could just do a mirror withing windows if it's windows based, then it boots up from one nvme/ssd/drive or just setup with software to do mirror in windows.

I have used raid 1 on ssd and has not killed them would really depend what you use them for.
So raid 1 mean it could read from any of the two and system would continue working when one is gone there is no extra magic that they do that would kill the drives. It's just both slowly die together at similar rate.

I stand to be corrected, but I think it functions like this:

Drive0 = 'primary' ; primary is used as standard OS drive and read + written to. This is then read from Drive0 and written to Drive1 "instantly". That is to say - AFAIK it does not read/write to the OS, from 'either or' of the drives, just Drive0. I may be wrong.

RAID1, AFAIR is ment for "critical" redundency EG Boot Drive0 fails, server is rebooted and finds + boots off of Drive1 which is part of the RAID1 array.

Please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Petester]

He is running some Radio software called Kenwood Digital Radio software and it needs to be running 24/7 . Keeps track of where the guys are deployed in a National Park in Zimbabwe. They would be radioing in from various locations

 

[SomeoneOnCarbonite]

I stand to be corrected, but I think it functions like this:

Drive0 = 'primary' ; primary is used as standard OS drive and read + written to. This is then read from Drive0 and written to Drive1 "instantly". That is to say - AFAIK it does not read/write to the OS, from 'either or' of the drives, just Drive0. I may be wrong.

RAID1, AFAIR is ment for "critical" redundency EG Boot Drive0 fails, server is rebooted and finds + boots off of Drive1 which is part of the RAID1 array.

Please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

As I mentioned above, the write occurs to one drive and then is duplicated to the other. The reads are split between the two. It's the only implementation that makes sense. There is no reason not to do that, and gain the double read speeds.


Raid0 gives you double write speed too, because it alternatives the writes.

 

[SomeoneOnCarbonite]

He is running some Radio software called Kenwood Digital Radio software and it needs to be running 24/7 . Keeps track of where the guys are deployed in a National Park in Zimbabwe. They would be radioing in from various locations

Am I understanding correctly, so the data is not critical, it is the uptime that is critical? For example, even with a mirror set, how would it address MB or controller failure? Or has he just had some bad luck with harddrives in the past and trying to eliminate this bottleneck?

 

[souljazk]

Thanks for that . I guess software RAID is probably what I am going to do as his budget is pretty limited. Just unsure if I should go NVME M.2 SSD or SATA SSD or SATA HDD. No idea what his file server is for but he said whole drive must be mirrored

I'd strongly advise him against RAID if its s/ware RAID.

I get the feeling s/he might be someone who once heard of the myth of RAID0 and how life changing it was at the time... Times evolved and we have data to back it up

With 2x NVME or SATA drives installed, free 3rd party tools can clone Disk0 to Disk1, no raid needed and if Disk0 fails, Disk1 is the next drive with boot partions. This is the least risky solution in my eyes, and I'm sure its much cheaper then a pair of RAID cards or data recovery. Add 1x offsite backup and he is covering his bare basics for NB data.

People have to remember raid is not a backup its just a protection mechanism to help when you have hardware failure.

Don't think software raid is as unreliable as hardware raid from external cards as it's implemented on server hardware also making use of the same software available for desktop grade hardware. The catch is hardware raid is managed by the addon card and not by the cpu and it tends to have battery backup option to minimize data loss to allow the card to keep the cached data and complete once drives are back online.

Ihanx, I know its not a backup My hate for s/w RAID is in part because if your BIOS gets corrupted / must be downgraded, changes could be made that affect the s/w RAID.

It's just too many eggs in 1 basket for my liking.

 

[souljazk]

As I mentioned above, the write occurs to one drive and then is duplicated to the other. The reads are split between the two. It's the only implementation that makes sense. There is no reason not to do that, and gain the double read speeds.


Raid0 gives you double write speed too, because it alternatives the writes.

As I mentioned above, the write occurs to one drive and then is duplicated to the other.

I know, thats why I said "This is then read from Drive0 and written to Drive1 "instantly". We on the same page?

 

[Petester]

Thanks guys. I'm not really comfortable with the whole RAID setup anyway. It's not my area of expertise so I was trying to find the simplest option for both of us. Just going on voice messages on whatsapp as he is in the bush . Perhaps I suggest he drop RAID and look at a proper backup solution. Again not my thing but will do some research

Thanks for the replies. Helped a lot
I can now do away with the RAID idea because it's as exciting as paint drying and sounds like a nightmare anyway

 

[SomeoneOnCarbonite]

I'd strongly advise him against RAID if its s/ware RAID.

I get the feeling s/he might be someone who once heard of the myth of RAID0 and how life changing it was at the time... Times evolved and we have data to back it up

With 2x NVME or SATA drives installed, free 3rd party tools can clone Disk0 to Disk1, no raid needed and if Disk0 fails, Disk1 is the next drive with boot partions. This is the least risky solution in my eyes, and I'm sure its much cheaper then a pair of RAID cards or data recovery. Add 1x offsite backup and he is covering his bare basics for NB data.


Ihanx, I know its not a backup My hate for s/w RAID is in part because if your BIOS gets corrupted / must be downgraded, changes could be made that affect the s/w RAID.

It's just too many eggs in 1 basket for my liking.

I tend to agree here. Recovery from a mirror is not as seamless as in theory. Get him two cheap NUC's off of the site and duplicate the drives.

 

[souljazk]

Thanks guys. I'm not really comfortable with the whole RAID setup anyway. It's not my area of expertise so I was trying to find the simplest option for both of us. Just going on voice messages on whatsapp as he is in the bush . Perhaps I suggest he drop RAID and look at a proper backup solution. Again not my thing but will do some research

Thanks for the replies. Helped a lot
I can now do away with the RAID idea because it's as exciting as paint drying and sounds like a nightmare anyway

This is def a easy solution:

With 2x NVME or SATA drives installed, free cheap 3rd party tools can clone Disk0 to Disk1 on a schedule, no raid needed and if Disk0 fails, Disk1 is the next drive with boot partions. This is the least risky solution in my eyes.

 

[Petester]

Ok cool. Thanks again for all the input!
Gonna close this for now.