Setting up RAID for a bit of a newbie

[bubblesnout]

I had a hard drive kick the bucket this past week, luckily it was only used for my OS and software installations so I didn't lose any important data, however it has made me finally decide to implement RAID 1 and keep both of my drives mirrored to other drives (so 4 drives in total) so I don't need to fret about drive failure so much.
Firstly, can I do this (2 drives mirrored to 2 other identical drives) with my motherboard (Asus P5Q)? If it's going to work for me, is there a simple guide that I could follow to get me started? I've never mucked about with RAID before so it's all a bit over my head at the moment.

 

[newtekie1]

If you have 4 of the same drive, I'd use RAID5 instead. Still protects against 1 drive failure, and gives access to more usable drive space. It should be pretty easy to setup using the Intel RAID controller, of course you will have to format all of the drives...

 

[bubblesnout]

They won't all be the same drives, 2 will be larger than the other 2. Can you explain how RAID 5 works in an easy-to-understand way? Would I be able to use it even with 2 drives one size and 2 drives another size?

 

[AsRock]

They won't all be the same drives, 2 will be larger than the other 2. Can you explain how RAID 5 works in an easy-to-understand way? Would I be able to use it even with 2 drives one size and 2 drives another size?

Should give you more of a idea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

For me at least i liked running 2 arrays and not just one as i found my self using them both which was better as using one did not delay the other tasks i was doing on the other array. Were as if all the disks were in one array i found it more delayed.

It will go by the smallest drive and there is more risk using odd drives( pending on how odd ).

 

[TheLaughingMan]

RAID is nice for the system drive, but if you are truly worried about data lose, off site storage is the best option. Simple buy/build a external drive or server. Then backup all your important data on it. Since it will not see nearly as much as use, being off most of the time, it is far less likely to fail on you. You can set either to automatically backup your data every week just a a automated virus scanner.

For what you are trying to do, you will need a nested RAID, but I don't know how flexible that is. I am not well versed with RAID configurations, but it sounds like you want something similar to AsRock's setup. 2 arrays, 1 for your data and 1 for your system, but their own seperate RAID 1.

 

[bubblesnout]

Thanks for the info guys, much appreciated I understand that a RAID setup is no alternative to a data backup, I'm pretty much looking into this from a redundancy point of view. I do need to try and figure out a backup plan that is going to work for me. I can't really do any cloud-based backup, being in Australia I have very limited speeds when it comes to that stuff. Best I can do is get an external drive for backups I suppose, but I'll be looking into that also.

 

[timta2]

I use Raid 0 with a slightly delayed backup to a bigger drive. After some problems with Raid 1 years ago I decided that isn't the way to go for a backup. Any errors, problems or malware will be copied to the mirrored/backup drive. It also used to piss me off that the array had to constantly rebuild taking forever (I had a POS drive at the time that later died on me).

It's really easy to setup automated backups nowadays. Windows 7 even has built in automated (for the most part) backup.