I do not trust any RAID types for home use. I've got 2 Terabytes of Data that I want to copy (duplicate) to about 4-6 drives for redundancy so that I will never lose these pics and videos I've created of my family. I know that 100% failure prevention is impossible. And yes I know the obvious "copy to many sources such as online storage, DVDs, etc.".
However let's get back to hard disks for now. I am not focusing on anything else for this thread.
So I do not trust RAID for home use, and so if I am going to copy new pictures or video to a primary disk, it would be nice if I could find some kind of controller card that would essentially do a copy on demand to the other drives so that I'd have complete duplicates of anything I do to my primary drive.
My understanding is that RAID 1 does this but then you still have the problem of it being a RAID issue…that you're still being dependent on an array which is not what I want.
I merely want the action of RAID 1 (meaning I write to disk A, write the same to disk b, c, d,.etc.) without the reliance or dependency on any stupid failure prone array.
I think ideally if I can set up a box, put about 6 drives in it and somehow maybe get a couple of controller cards that when I write to a designated drive…or delete, or whatever, it duplicates that action realtime to the other x drives.
Anyone seen anything that can do this such as a card (I want to build my own box and drives, etc. to do this) outside of something like this: http://www.aleratec.com/alhddcrhadid.html or this http://www.abcusinc.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=HDD but I want to do it myself over a controller card(s) in my own box that I will be building?
Obviously a RAID controller card is not what I'm after here. I'm after hopefully a card that allows me to plug in lets say 4 drives internally to it and somehow it duplicates from a designated primary drive to the other 3. I'm not sure if such a thing exists.
Basically I want to build my own server doing what that box does…and put an ASUS board in it, etc. I want complete control over this but I need to find some sort of plan using a card or something that does this duplication without the raid array dependency.
Best Answer
RAID1 is exactly what you want. Buy a well known controller card so if it craps out you can replace it. That way:
My understanding is you can get RAID controllers that keep the configuration on the controller, so the disks are 1:1 duplicates without proprietary information on the disk. This means you can pull it out and put it into another PC.
I don't see how this would be any more "failure prone" than a disk duplicator. With a disk duplicator:
What happens when your primary hard drive you are duplicating gets a bad sector, and when you are duplicating the duplicator can't read it and writes 0's to your other hard drives? With RAID you would be warned and while the data would be lost on one disk it is still intact on the others.