Advice required on purchasing a Raid array

mrtee · #1 (**permalink**) 10-17-2006, 10:54 AM

At work I edit mini DV footage using adobe premiere and output to Mpeg vcd.

I seem to get a fair amount of hard drive failures which results in a loss of data. It has been suggested that a Raid array would be a good idea as if one drive fails the information will be mirrored onto the other drives and you jsut ened to replace the faulty drive.

On looking into this there are many types of Raid and drives that can be used. Also there is internal Raid or a seperate external rack of drives that can be used. Looking for a "fairly" cheap solution with ideally a terabyte of acutal storage.

Not sure if an external set of drives or internal is preferable, and if I should have the c: drive on a raid array too?

Mark W · #2 (**permalink**) 10-17-2006, 10:43 PM

I guess you are after something like this.

http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=21823

I am not an expert but I believe that with the right motherboard a raid array can be built internally.

One thing... you say you have lots of drive failures, I realise they do happen but you seem to imply you often get them, this suprises me and makes me wonder if there may be another problem withthe system???

Evereddie · #3 (**permalink**) 10-17-2006, 11:13 PM

You will have a lot of failures if you were using IBM drives. Otherwise you better look into what is killing your drives bfore going any further.

mrtee · #4 (**permalink**) 10-18-2006, 04:08 PM

im not talking hundreds of failures, maybe 2 drives per year. also its happened on different machines so I dont think the PC's are inherently faulty.

mrtee · #5 (**permalink**) 10-18-2006, 04:09 PM

has anyone else got an opinion on the Thecus N2100 or any other alternatives?

Mark W · #6 (**permalink**) 10-18-2006, 06:26 PM

2 drive faliures on one machine per year is a very high failure rate I think.

I have a computer with 4 drives in, on all the time, some 4 years old and no failures. One drive bust when nearly new ages ago (as occasionally happens) and another broke due to being bashed.

I think a failure rate at that level is very strange and merits investigation.

GTWCMT · #7 (**permalink**) 10-18-2006, 07:56 PM

With over 500 HDD's going through here, weve had one failure in the past 4 years.
You will find that HDD's fail for a few reasons - manufacturing, heat and power are the other causes.
Youre better off building your own array system, they are not costly and are scalable. essentailly youre building a cheap computer as it wont really be used for anything so on board VGA 256MB RAM, and a Low end processor, just a good motherboard and sata support, plus some PIC slots to add cards to the system.