Used this 250GB Samsung 850 evo for little more than 3 years, scared it will fail anytime soon since it holds all my applications and stuff that will take way too long to install back. Can I just buy another one and put it in raid 1 so in case of hardware failure I still have the other SSD still functioning?
Also what software would be recommended on my windows 7 OS?
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>little more than 3 years
Yes and? Age has nothing to do with the reliability of the disk, whether mechanical or SSD. I have old 500GB mechanical drives that are easily 7 years old. Still with 99% drive health.
I'm also an owner of a bunch of Samsung drives. I have an original 120GB 840 series SSD that has been my main (and still is) OS and application drive for every single build. Also have a 250GB and 500GB 850 EVO that each have 4-5TB written to them and both are still are at 100% drive health.
just in case it fails, if it fails I'm doomed
Do you have NO other drive in your entire build at all? Like is that SSD the only thing? RAID is NOT considered backup. Even if you were using RAID, you should have a dedicated backup drive.
Got 2 other hard drives, 3TB and 4TB which are almost full, these are backed up. My SSD is the only one not backed up or raided since I have no other drives to do it with.
Also I've never done raid before, or know the software recommended to do it with.
For backup purpose, you could just get another cheap mech disk and backup the SSD to that. If the SSD fails, then get a new one and recover from the backup. As for best RAID version for your needs, RAID 1 (mirror array) would be best but you take a 50% read/write hit. So you'd have 2 SSD's working together at half speed.
And just saying from guy who runs a server. Don't rely on RAID, software or otherwise. I have
>2x1TB RAID 1
>2x2TB RAID 1
>2x4TB RAID 1
>8TB drive dedicated for backing up all the arrays.
I have 3 copies of all my data.
what software is best for raid 1?
Windows 7 has the ability to do 2 types of RAID built in. RAID 0 and 1.
>RAID 0
Striped array. Your performance will be twice as fast, but if one disk dies, you lose everything
>RAID 1
Mirrored array. Mention in the other post. Both drive get written to whenever you do something. Drive speed cut in half
Windows 10 brings the ability to do RAID 5 and RAID 10
>RAID 5
Requires 3 drives. Puts 2 drive together and another drive of equal size for parity. You take a severe write and read hit because all 3 drives need to be written to. I don't recommend RAID 5
>RAID 10
RAID 0 and 1 together. Requires minimum 4 drives. 2 drives for performance automatically backed up to 2 drives in RAID 1. Good for data that you CANNOT afford to have go down, and need speed. Still not good for redundancy.
Just buy a couple really large capacity drives and make dedicated backups.
I have a 500gb 850 evo, with 200+ TB written, it is still very healthy, also according to S.M.A.R.T. it seems to not even have felt the 200+ TBs that were written on it, no reserved blocks used or any other sign of wear. According to every test I could find online your drive will likely last you at least another 3 years. Get a program that can access S.M.A.R.T. so you can see how your drive is doing.
I actually use the Samsung Magician program. I figure fuck it, I don't buy anything but Samsung drives. Might as well use their tool. Allows you to flash new firmware too.
I also use magician, but I didn't want autists yelling at me because their favorite open-source alternative is somehow better than the official tool. Also, do you run it in rapid mode? If you do, don't, it's just a gimmick, it basically just uses ram to cheat during benchmarks or something.
Don't SSDs go read-only when they're dead so you can copy all the data on them?
No I don't use Rapid mode. The drive I'm booting off of is an original (non pro, non EVO) 840 series 120GB. Doesn't support Rapid mode. And yea I heard it was placebo.
Good ones do yes. Cheap ones just die and that's it.
Cloning for a backup and raid 1 copies the SSD/HDD byte for byte right? Like the resgistry, Drive letter (C:, D:), settings of all your applications, OS themes on it?
I have a samsung 840 EVO 120GB which was used as a cache/staging drive.
I have over 1.2PB written still reports full health.
I wouldn't exactly count on that as a backup strategy. Even if the cell or whatever goes read-only, the controller might make the data unreadable anyway by corrupting and orphaning it in pieces.
Raid is not a backup but a functionality to provide increased availability.
You need offline storage for a backup like another HDD/SSD,tape,CD/DVD/Bluray
>what software is best for raid 1?
a hardware raid controller, or just use the standard raid function of your chip set
heard motherboard raid is terrible
>hardware raid controller
>motherboard raid chip
NO. NO NO NO. Garbage idea unless you're using a dedicated controller that is some serious server grade shit with ECC RAM on the card itself. Windows RAID is reliable and if you're on linux, use mdadm.
snapRAID for winows seems the most used option for both backups ans raid
Whats wrong with motherboard controllers in comparison to software RAID? Just curious as I've never done either
if you actually are "doomed" if you lose your data, a RAID is not what you are looking for, as previously mentioned. You do want a backup in case of ransomware, user error, fire, theft etc.
Wow, I guess my ssd will die with me.
What's the suggested backup software for a deticated backup drive?
> RAID 5
> Requires 3 drives. Puts 2 drive together and another drive of equal size for parity. You take a severe write and read hit because all 3 drives need to be written to.
Dead wrong.
RAID5 enables ALL the drives minus one in the array to be written to concurrently. You won't get QUITE drive_count - 1 speeds in reality, but it's bloody capable at providing throughput.
If you got RAID5 over 8 drives, you can use seven for actual data writes and only "loose" one for parity, both capacity and throughput wise.
The only thing that necessarily goes up a bit is access latency for individual files, obviously it'll tend to average out at the worst timing the drives can have over an array. That said, you're NOT constrained to accessing one file at a time and then waiting for the next. A lot get queued up, drives optimize accesses with NCQ, everything goes into buffers and so on and you'll get pretty good speeds overall even if you access many small files and the latency PER file is comparatively high.
Yes, either should do that.
I just drag the files over. I have two 1tb drives in nice enclosures. Use them for movies and keep them unplugged when not in use incase of lightning or some shit. The problem i ran into is that its over half full so i cant drag and drop the root folder anymore because it thinks it doesnt have space but it does
> Whats wrong with motherboard controllers in comparison to software RAID?
You kinda have to qualify whose software RAID.
It's often some poorly written crap that only works with the specific motherboard, has poor management and idiotic failures if you got some BIOS configured WIndows software RAID.
On the other hand, the widely used Linux mdadm software RAID has stability - it will not die because a bunch of bytes at the start of the array are corrupted or because you were trying to plug in drive 1 and then 2 alternatingly while you were trying to figure out which one of drives 1-4 failed.
It also performs really well, plus managing it is easy including changes between RAID levels and adding/removing drives and all that.
On Linux, BSD and OSX, I'd use borg. It has efficient remote verifiable and mountable backups & is easy to use and schedule in a cron / systemd timer or whatever job: