On the fence about this

At what point did you stop buying external hard drives and switch to RAID?

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What do you mean "at what point"?

what kind of raid doesnt require a hard drive?

RAID cannot replace offline backup kek, its not meant for backup

Are you confusing RAID with NAS? I have an external enclosure that has RAID support, so I'm confused about what you're trying to get at?

What's the point of RAID for a home setup? If I'm going to use extra drives to protect my data I'm going to use them as cold backups, my personal data doesn't need high-availability.

RAID= Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
NAS= Network Attached Storage
I use a NAS to keep all my shit for long term sotrage. It used a RAID 5 configuration (which requires at least 3 disks and provides a speed boost to reading / writing. More importantly if one of the drives dies you can just switch it out like nothing happened. If two die the data is gone.)

for home usage offline backup is more important than a RAID setup, RAID is designed for high data availability not backing up large amounts of data for long term

bit-rot detection and prevention. Availability is just a bonus desu senpai

>what kind of raid doesnt require a hard drive?
you would use an internal hard drive, of course. dense motherfucker

RAIDs are used for backups all the time in corporate settings. SANs, VTLs, etc

It doesn't have to be network attached, though that would be fine. The question is, when does it make more sense to buy an external enclosure with a RAID controller inside it that holds 4+ drives instead of buying a large capacity external USB standalone drive?

not using it for backup. it will be a datastore.

what bit rot in cold storage, I had a 30 year old floppies that didnt have any bit rot just sitting on shelf, HDDs are even more reliable
that would mean that old tape libraries many companies have are useless, and they obviously are not

>It used a RAID 5 configuration (which requires at least 3 disks and provides a speed boost to reading / writing.
RAID 5 does provide a boost to read speeds, but actually takes a performance hit on writes since the error correction bits have to be calculated.

>RAID= Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
>NAS= Network Attached Storage

OP here... seriously why are there so many anons ITT who think these terms mean the same thing? Come on Jow Forums you are better than this...

>RAIDs are used for backups all the time in corporate settings
what if there's a fire?

>I had a 30 year old floppies that didnt have any bit rot
that you know about

that is why large corporations have offline cold backups, they sure arent depending on online RAID setups to save their important data, data is mirrored to multiple sites

if I dont know about it its not important really, as I said with paranoid bit rot philosophy you could say that most of tape storage facilities are useless

HDDs have built-in error correction, and even in the astronomically low chance of a bit-flip, I could still restore from backup. You can still get checksumming without raid, so it's easy to know which file got fucked.

off-site replication. Every corporate IT dept worth its salt has off-site backups or some sort. Whether it is live/snapshot replication or simply having a truck take drives/tapes off site.

sounds like RAID isn't a backup, then.

What?

OP never said a word about backup

>can't into following reply chain

bingo

I've had a file server since the late 90's, external drives weren't really a thing yet

>You can still get checksumming without raid
not of any worthwhile sort. For one thing, RAID is what enables ZFS and Btrfs to automatically correct errors without the application ever noticing.
>HDDs have built-in error correction, and even in the astronomically low chance of a bit-flip, I could still restore from backup
I regularly get checksum errors when I scrub. Those wouldn't be corrected at all if I weren't using redundancy (ie, RAID), and if I just threw up my hands and said "Oh, who cares! Ext4 is fine!" I'd never know until I went to use the file. Hopefully I'd notice the corruption. And hopefully I'd notice it before the corrupted version had been copied into my backups. Silently, without any read errors from the disk or anything.

Both Btrfs and ZFS have saved me from this. You're foolish to stick your head in the sand and assume that hard drives (or SSDs) will either return completely correct data or fail completely.

>RAIDs are used for backups all the time in corporate settings. SANs, VTLs, etc
Anybody using RAID for backups in a corporate environment should be fired. RAID is for uptime, not backups.

These are not mutually exclusive or very related.

You can get external drives in RAID and external drives with USB3 + UAS that are suitable for use in a typical Linux SW RAID.

Or you can run them as individual drives in a cloud storage setup that has erasure coding or replication but isn't technically RAID.

Either way, you probably want RAID6 or maybe 5 or erasure coding if resilience against HDD failures is desirable. Do it with Linux mdadm RAID if in any doubt what the ideal solution is, it's the most performant / HW friendly thing.

RAID-ed drives are an obvious useful target for putting backups on.

Gives you resilience against drive failures [no, not just uptime].

> it will be a datastore
So if you're not in the brave new cloud world, you just do a primary array and its backup with version history, both on RAID6.

The backup might have to be physically bigger if the data doesn't compress well.

>What's the point of RAID for a home setup?
HDD fail whether at home or not.

Plus cold backups take extra time to manage and will obviously generally not have recent data [tendentially the data you need most because you last worked on it] because you were too lazy to run a backup last hour or last day or even last month.

Running an automatic backup or instant replication with staggered versioning is far more reliable to get a backup.

technically all motherboards a couple generation from now support RAID

Don't use onboard RAID, the tools are usually shit.

Do mdadm RAID in Linux. Proven, flexible , stable, performs well.

I laugh my ass off when I watch some YouTube techie guru post a vid on how their expensive {sponsored} nas configured in some redundant raid array went all tits up and they lost all their data.

If you're serious about data protection, build your nas configured with a redundant raid array, and also upload your data to either a second nas for backup, or if you're not some degenerate pedo, up your data to some cloud service like google drive or backblaze. Online cloud storage sites are getting cheap.

Not sure how that works but I had a encrypted hdd, and after few years some were corrupted

Your supposed to put them in the freezer. They last longer that way!

I never bought them for a long-term storage.
Also I don't favor hardware fakeRAID and don't see the point of a real HW RAID at home.

>up your data to some cloud service like google drive or backblaze. Online cloud storage sites are getting cheap

im so tired of people mentioning cloud storage. the type of person to consider RAID usually has 30TB+.

unless you want to spend $200 a month on keeping your shit in the cloud, it's not a feasible option. if you're some little kid with

When I brought a motherboard with enough SATA ports.

I set up a raid server after a drive failed and I lost 3tb of my life

Wouldn't that be applicable only when the calculations bottleneck the writes?

spinics.net/lists/raid/msg38060.html

>i7 2600
generic_sse: 15088.000 MB/sec
avx: 19936.000 MB/sec

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If talking about NAS, I went from NAS back to external storage. Mostly due to repeated drive failures from overheating or bad drives.
System runs like this:
PCs I like get clonezilla'd on the network to TV media box that I have a spare 4 tb drive in while I am doing other things or out of the house.
Then from media 4 tb drive to usb 4 tb (now updated to 8tb as only $140 deal) to toss (padded) in fire/water proof safe.
I do this once a month. My 4 TB external now has all my older media backed up in the fire/water proof safe. Verify on the 1st'ish to make sure all is well.

what if you have redundant raid arrays with one of them being offline and offsite most of the time

and most (not all, but most) of that different purpose can be served with a good modern RAID system. The main thing you're missing with RAID is something off-site, so that you can recover if your house burns down.

user, RAID is not backup.

RAID provides fault-tolerance to ensure availability of storage and, in some cases, accelerated read/write speeds to improve the aggregate throughput of the storage array. Backup serves an entirely different purpose.

RAID devices / devices with redundant storage are good targets for backups, but on their own don't provide the benefits of a backup (mitigating site disaster, a separate copy that isn't overwritten automatically by production data, avoiding human error made to the production data, etc.).

My bad, deleted the post to elaborate

>a separate copy that isn't overwritten automatically by production data, avoiding human error made to the production data
snapshots.

RAID does not provide snapshots. The SAN / software on top of the hardware running a RAID array provide that feature. Hence RAID is not backup.

As useful as snapshots and delta image backups are, they don't provide all of the necessary features for a backup or DR plan on their own. At the very least, you still need a second physical storage location in the event the primary hardware is stolen/damaged/otherwise unusable, and an off-site backup in the event of a site-wide disaster.

rsync + WAN is my RAID

>The SAN / software on top of the hardware running a RAID array provide that feature. Hence RAID is not backup.
there's not been a reason for decades to use old-style RAID like that. Modern systems like ZFS put together the software RAID layer, the volume manager, and the filesystem. And hence can conveniently give you read-only snapshots that you can easily reach back into (or revert to completely). In other words, you have the "history" that a true backup is supposed to give you.

Dumb fuck doesn't know it got changed to Independent Disks decades ago. All hard drives are inexpensive, Gramps.