[slackline]

RAID Bios is generally shit and lags way behind software RAID (how often do you upgrade your BIOS anyway?), use software as implemented in/under whatever OS you use.  No idea what software options there are under Win7 I'm afraid, perhaps this is useful 

For the different types of RAID levels and what they mean see here (would type out a simpler explanation but feeling particularly lazy).

It won't be that expensive, but make sure if you're going to mirror an existing drive you get exactly the same HD or if you're buying two new ones get two identical ones (if one's larger then its additional space isn't used and is therefore a waste).

For future expansion consider Logical Volume Management (LVM).  I've one 500Gb for OS and two 1Tb under RAID1, partitioned into four for music/video/pics/work, but I started to fill these up, so I grabbed two more 1Tb and set them up as a second RAID1, then used LVM to grow the existing partitions to use the additional space on my second RAID1 array.  All seamless and plenty of space (for another year or so!).

RAID doesn't protect against power surges or fires.

[Jim]

The only thing I really understood there was that I need 2 identical drives which I have(2xsamsung spinpoint 1TB).
I've already read the wiki about RAID and I'm non the wiser.
I'm not really interested in learning about it TBH but I would like to have it to back up incase of HD failure/crash
Are you saying that the software route would be best?
could you recomend any programs for win 7?

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

I have RAID 1, 2x2TB drives set up mainly cos I wanted to play with it, but without going back over all the pros and cons of it I will probably get rid of it soon and revert to two drives. In a nutshell it's not really a backup as if the card controller (or MB in my case) goes pop you lose the lot, a better back up would be put two 2TB drives in your machine and schedule something like Sync toy to do a nightly backup to the second drive. Then for belt and braces use Mozy/Carbonite etc to do an online BU. For info I've got a free trial with Zovo which is only £20 a year for 'unlimited', so far nearly 100gig of photos and music have backed up online! http://zovo.co/index.php

[slackline]

Are you saying that the software route would be best?

Yes.

could you recomend any programs for win 7?

Not with out Googling and I'd have no idea which is "best" as I've no Win7 install with (or without) RAID to try them.

RAID protects against the last sentence here

Eventually all mechanical hard disk drives fail, so to mitigate loss of data, some form of redundancy is needed, such as RAID or a regular backup system.

So you could alternatively do as Obi suggests, but I'm not sure that it would protect you against card controller (/motherboard) failing (or suffering from a power surge) as both drives are still connected to the same device, regardless of whether you're using RAID to mirror the drive automagically or a scheduled synchornisation of two separate drives.

If you want to protect data on a separate device connected to a separate power supply then a NAS is the best option (and if you want to have it backed up off-site you could always ask a mate to have it at their pad and set up the router to permit synchronisation over t'net, although I'd do the initial copy on a local network).

I've use Linksys NSLU2's and a Netgear ReadyNAS, I've tinkered with both as they are fundamentally Linux systems with excellent Web GUI interfaces for configuration, and the later is an absolute piece of piss to use to back up any computers on your network, regardless of their OS.  The one thing I'd do though is to go with an Intel/ARM processor as the SPARC based one I have doesn't have sufficient processing power for transcoding on the fly (the NAS's invariably have uPnP functionality which means you can serve up your pictures, music and films from it, they're lower powered than having a desktop on too).

[Jim]

Thank you for a concise answer as always, but to fully earn a wad point you will have to go off googling for me and recomend me some RAID software for Win7
Longer term I will definately be getting a NAS as I am currently looking at getting rid of my PS3 due to issues like Cinavia and overly controlling Sony firmware shit.
Maybe looking to get a WD-TV live or something or might just build another HTPC, I will be on AVforums about that, If you have any advice on that then I'd be keen to hear it. Also I am thinking about installing surge protection on the computer and would also like any thoughts on that.
Cheers 

[slackline]

Surge protection is something I too should utilise but haven't yet (especially as both computer and NAS are on the same circuit).

Never built an HTPC, but only hear good things about XBMC (under which ever OS takes your fancy).  AVFroums would be my first port of call too.

If you're going to get a NAS anyway then if you didn't already got two 1Tb drives then I'd say you'd probably be better off saving cash on getting the NAS instead, although often things like the ReadyNAS Duo and others are sold without drives so you could just save the HDs until you're ready to get a NAS and bung them in that (providing you don't need the space and hope you don't have a catastrophic failure in the mean time!).

[stevej]

What slackline said, Win 7 does soft RAID by itself but it's really hidden, link

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

So you could alternatively do as Obi suggests, but I'm not sure that it would protect you against card controller (/motherboard) failing (or suffering from a power surge) as both drives are still connected to the same device, regardless of whether you're using RAID to mirror the drive automagically or a scheduled synchornisation of two separate drives.

My reasoning is with standard drives if the MB dies you can plug a stand alone drive into any PC and recover the data easily, does anyone know if RAID1 writes the drives in standard disk format? So if you took one drive off and plugged it into a PC it would be recognised outside a RAID setup? I presumed not, but may be wrong.  I know for other RAID setups (striped etc) one drive alone has meaningless data on it and if a RAID controller dies it makes it very difficult to recover, sounds like this is an advantage of software RAID, although everything I read up on it said software raid was a poor relation of hardware raid and could slow your machine down significantly, but it sounds like it has improved quite a bit under Win7

[mr__j5]

With RAID1 you can take one of the discs and just use it as a normal drive, but you can't for any of the other RAID types.

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

With RAID1 you can take one of the discs and just use it as a normal drive, but you can't for any of the other RAID types.

That's nice to hear, maybe I'll stick with it for the time being. Out of interest I'm using Intel Rapid Storage Technology that is built into my Dell motherboard chipset. Dead easy to setup in BIOS, has a small simple Intel app that monitors the RAID.

[Jim]

So just when i thought I had settled on software RAID, Obi throws the cat amongst the pigeons.....
It seems that there maybe a fight on for the title of 'The all seeing eye!!!'

I'll have a look at the RAID options on my Asus P5Q-E motherboard,
seems to have something called Intel® Matrix Storage Technology which sounds interesting?

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

seems to have something called Intel® Matrix Storage Technology which sounds interesting?

Think that's another name for what mines got.

[slackline]

With RAID1 you can take one of the discs and just use it as a normal drive, but you can't for any of the other RAID types.

Yep, thats the whole point of RAID1, if one of the discs fails you whip it out.  All the data resides on the one that remains and it could be used as a normal drive, but when you drop a replacement in the RAID software mirrors it over.

[Jim]

tried to RAID1 my 2 drives last night but it tells me all data will be lost off both drives and as I don't have a spare 1TB drive I need to find a work around

[Paul B]

For anyone with an intel readynas (doh!), there's now a dropbox installer add-on

[Fultonius]

With raid 1, if a drive dies you can plug another one straight in and it'll rebuild the volume.

I don't think you can chuck a raid 1 into any old computer, so if the controller dies you'll still need to recover the drive. (as far as I'm aware, might check up on that later)  I like my setup of pc, with separate NAS with 2 x 1tb Raid 1. It's also my music/film station for ny tv.

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

If anyone was thinking about buying more storage for RAID etc, now is a BAD time. Just been reading up on the harddrive shortage due to the floods in Thailand and associated hike in retail prices and it's shocking... On Amazon you'd normally recon on spending £40-60 on an internal SATA drive for 1TB-2TB but currently it's more like £100-200! The Samsung 2TB drive I bought before the summer for £55 is now shipping for £130! Most other retailers the same, sounds like it will be the same for several months yet and may lead to shortages of PCs and laptops for Xmas.

[Paul B]

I've been a bit of a moron with my PC/NAS and was wondering if anyone can think of a simple solution.

Basically I didn't bother partitioning my HD in the PC so I'm currently keeping a backup of all my media (windows libraries) and also a system image on the NAS, the files are about 0.5 Tb, meaning the image is pretty much the same size and the NAS is full when its actually just half full with two copies on each drive.

I'm a bit wary of leaving my backups (either bootable system image) or files vulnerable right now as its getting to the end of 4 years of work and a decent amount of writing and either going wrong (system or a few chapters etc.) isn't such a nice thought. I don't want to screw it up, nor do I wish to lose any of my photos (however shit some of them might be).

I could delete the files and just save a system image each day but given its backing up over wifi it'd be working pretty hard (and worsening as time goes on). 

Is it possible to create a bootable system image without including my libraries etc.?

[Clart]

Thought I'd tag this onto here. Anyone got any up to date advice/views on nas drives? Thinking of getting a 4tb one for home use, £160 sheets from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00FOKN7D8?cache=03cae22bef17b2adb4b8f3a9377f3c45&qid=1400886136&sr=8-2#ref=mp_s_a_1_2
Any advice/comments from peeps would be gratefully received.

[Paul B]

I thought that specific model didn't have RAID? Thus, it'd be useless for my applications. For something low power to simply stream video from I'm sure it'd be fine (but if your router has a USB port you might be able to do this with any drive).

[Clart]

I'm after extra storage, remote access to my files and backup for phone stuff. Do you use RAID for PC backup? Thought RAID was for duplication or to speed up hard drive read write speeds?

[Paul B]

I use it for redundancy, yes.

[Jaspersharpe]

I just bought a new TV so I need to get rid of all the old shit and sort out a neater, better way of doing stuff.

I want something small and tidy which will play media stuff through the tv without me having to fuck about with it or with plugging cables in etc. I guess some sort of NAS is the way to go but I've no idea what sort of thing I need. Would this mean I could e.g. download something on the PC / laptop, it would save it to the NAS and then I could just play it through the tv wirelessly? I don't really get all this shit yet......

Be good to rip all our old dvds (don't have loads) and store them on it etc but I don't think I'll need huge amounts of storage. Currently, all my music, photos, work etc are backed up to zovo taking up about 100GB in total.

Any ideas clever people? 

[Paul B]

EDIT: 100GB is FA.

The easiest way would be to simply download it to a laptop and then use Chromecast to get it on the TV. I wouldn't be certain (as I don't have Chromecast) but I'd imagine if you can view something on/from your network (so stored on a dedicated NAS or even just a HDD plugged into a router [which could be a cheap NAS option]) you could use this solution too.
^This seems like the best option post edit.

What I have is a ReadyNAS with my media on it and a Raspberry Pi running RaspBMC (XBMC), this basically keeps a media library which I can scroll through (using my phone as a remote / media library). You can no doubt buy commercial solutions to this problem, Roku perhaps? This was a ballache initially but now it seems like many flaws have been ironed out.

You could skip the NAS entirely and use a small low power PC (Asrock Ions seem a popular choice) and a big HDD to create a HTPC (Home Theatre PC) using XBMC (either using Win or XBMCubuntu) but I doubt this solution is for most, and it isn't for you.

You'll need a decent router for most of this.

Does your TV not have any USB or DLNA compatibility? If so you could skip all of the above and have an easy life.

[Jaspersharpe]

It's this....

http://www.trustedreviews.com/panasonic-tx-l42et60_TV_review

So I think the answer's yes?

And yeah I know 100GB is fuck all, was thinking more about future storage than what i already have.