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To Stripe or Not to Stripe |
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With the coming of SATA technology, it seems most system board makers have included an on-board RAID controller, allowing users to mirror or stripe their data across multiple drives. In the documentation, they suggest that RAID 0 (striping) will increase your drive capacity to the combined size of the multiple drives, while increasing the read/write speed. They also suggest that RAID 1 (mirror) is intended for data integrity, as it is a live backup of your data to another drive. The question is, “is either method a good option for you?”
This is a tough question to answer, as each situation really needs to be assessed on its own. However, I will do my best to address a few issues that may be worth considering before you make the decision to use this new technology.
First off, let’s look at the concept of the mirror. It seems rather simple and safe to use this technology, as it is a live backup of everything that is written to the hard drive. When working, this is a great way to eliminate down time, should a hard drive fail, and eliminate data loss. But, what I have noticed with several of my clients who have come to me to recover their data from such a setup is that the mirror can stop working without notifying the user. So, when the working drive fails, the data on the other drive is out dated and no longer useful to the user.
Now, with respect to the stripe; yes, it is fast and allows for a lot of storage space. The problem with the stripe is that if any drive in the array fails, none of the data stored on the array will be accessible without the help of a data recovery lab. And, when a data recovery lab works on a stripe set, they typically charge according to the number of hard drives in the array. Even if 2 out of 3 drives are in good working order, you may find yourself paying for 3 hard drive data recoveries.
In conclusion, I do believe that each of these methods do have a purpose and a place to be used. If the data you have to be stored on your computer is important to you, seek professional advice on the best method of backup is right for you. Should you be thinking of buying a large external hard drive, such as LaCie’s 500GB Big Disk, please note that these devices actually contain two 250GB hard drives setup in a stripe set. My suggestion is to make sure that the data on this device be backed up to another location. |
