General RAID question

[TaJMoX]

Sorry, I couldn't find the General RAID forum.

Is this how RAID works?

I made a quick animation to best explain what I want to do.

http://paperpiratestudio.com/ani/raid-question.swf

I want to buy a RAID controller, 4-6 SATA disks, and 4 hot-swap 5.25 drive bays, to turn an old computer into a backup server.

I'd like to take the backup home with me weekly, lock it in a safe, but still have the backup at the office running and in tact for data redundancy.

Is this how it works? Do I need a certain RAID controller feature? How do I initialize the disks? Do I need 6 disks or 8 disks?

Any other tips to get me started?

THANKS!

 

[chgwhat]

You could do that, with a raid controller that could give you 2 mirrored drives , raid 1, you would have to be careful when drives are removed or inserted, and you better buy good drives. there is no guarantee, that the drives removed would be any good unless you shutdown the system to remove.


Tony ... aka chgwhat

When in doubt,,, Power out...

 

[denisfr]

Hello,

with 4 or 6 disk, you can consider to build a raid-5 array which is more 'space-eater' than raid-1.

But if you want to have 2 copies of your data, with raid-1, you must have exactly the same number of disk of both disk type (data and mirror).

So you'll have to perform disk manipulation, which is not recommended (removing all mirrors disk results in 'blocking' access on the raid-1 array).

Try another solution : online replication or disk image to tape (or DVD-RAM, DVD+RW) before leaving office.

It depends on what security level you want and also how much money you can spend

Denis