System partition on RAID 1 or not?
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Software mirroring (RAID 1) is a waste of time. Just take good backup of the drive using some sort of imaging software.
[SIZE="1"]Windows XP SP2 | Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H 780G | ATI Radeon HD3200 (HDMI Out) | AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (3.2 GHz) | 1TB Hard Drive | 2GB RAM
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2007-01-24, 11:05 AM
OK, so RAID1 is out
Is the early warning from SMART reliable? Anyone experience with SMART early warning? I dont want to crash and restore. I rather have a early warning and a planned migration to a new disk.
P4 3GHz 1GB, 250GB, nVidia dualTV, GBPVR 1.3.11, XP
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2007-01-24, 11:19 AM
I haven't used SMART, but I've read it doesn't really do much. Are you worried about the hard drive failing? or the OS becoming corrupt? If you have a couple of drives why don't you do a ntbackup to another drive once a week or something (scheduled task). Then you know that you can always get your OS back if your HDD crashes.
[SIZE="1"]Windows XP SP2 | Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H 780G | ATI Radeon HD3200 (HDMI Out) | AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (3.2 GHz) | 1TB Hard Drive | 2GB RAM
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2007-01-24, 11:45 AM
I am only worried about the HDD crashing.
So if SMART is not usable then RAID 1 is back because I don't want to wait for a crash, crashing means losing mail. I tried it on my test PC (pulling out the system disk) and it worked very nice.
P4 3GHz 1GB, 250GB, nVidia dualTV, GBPVR 1.3.11, XP
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2007-01-24, 12:58 PM
erik Wrote:I am only worried about the HDD crashing. SMART is like a scrying glass. won't trust that to predict a crash either ;-) software raid1 should work, only problem you have is if you want to change dynamic disk sizes. i hope you're doing a regular backup of your data? sub Wrote:Yep, what he said. curiosity killed the cat 
2007-01-24, 01:03 PM
K.S. Wrote:i hope you're doing a regular backup of your data? YES, every night incremental, weekly full, keeping 2 full backups. Found Cobian Backup to do a nice job.
P4 3GHz 1GB, 250GB, nVidia dualTV, GBPVR 1.3.11, XP
Support Comskip, visit the forum and donate at http://www.comskip.org/
2007-01-24, 01:26 PM
sw raid 1 does work but can be un-reliable. Works GREAT when there is no real failure. IE you yank a drive. But I've seen it report that one drive is bad and it turns out to be the other drive that is bad (It says DISK 0 when really it's DISK 1). I've also seen it report one drive as bad and all but destroy the contents of the other drive when you "break" the mirror as per M$'s suggested way of replacing a dead drive. So a current back up is well advised.
Not sure how much mail/traffic you get on your mail/web side of things but Acronis is wicked fast and can be run regularly to snap an incremental image of the drive (every 15 minutes say). Seriously is one of the best backup suites out there especially when coupled with the Universal Restore feature. Whenever I am about to install a new codec or plugin on my PVR I snap an image and if I don't like the plugin or codec I revert to the image instead of potentially fighting with software to get things back to working state. Acronis can replace my 20 Gig OS partition (with 5 Gigs used) in about 7 - 10 minutes over a 100Mb network, it takes about the same to snap the image and store it on a network share.
[SIZE="1"]Main HTPC - ASUS M2NPV-VM Athlon 4200+ X2 1 GIG DDR2-667 500 GIG of HD space Hauppauge PVR-150 PCI Hauppauge DVB-S-Plus GBPVR 99.12 VFD/LCD (Still working on it)
Client HTPC - Athlon 2500+, 512 Mb RAM, 200Gig Dump, 250Gig Archive, 20 Gig OS Hauppagge WinTV PVR USB2 GBPVR 99.05 Client - SoftMod Xbox, XBMC[/SIZE] |
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