RAID1 2-bay enclosure - dangerous?

[frythecpuofbender]

I recently ordered a SilverStone Teratrend TS231U 2-bay enclosure, capable of RAID0/1/JBOD/normal mode.
Planned to do 2x4TB in RAID1 mode mirrored. Read up on lots of horror stories of the RAID controller in these kind of boxes reconstructing the RAID from an empty & newly inserted HD if one fails, thus loosing all data.

Anyone with experience about RAID1? What are the steps to be taken when one disk fails? Is there any software tool that can read the SilverStone enclosure's stats? Should I trust such a piece of hardware compared to software only RAID provided by Windows?

The alternative would be to just put 2 disks in and mirror-copy the whole disk with something like FreeFileSync or similar tools?
I want to feel secure about my data, but I wonder if it would not just be better to have 1x4TB onsite and then 1x4TB offsite and occasionally update them. (or buy a third 4TB drive)

 

[KentState]

Considering that the box comes with a RAID switch on the front, I would not expect much intelligence in the RAID controller.

In general, you are going to need something to back this up to regardless. Plan to buy a least one extra 4TB drive to keep backups on. Couple reasons, RAID 1 does not recover corrupted or over written files, RAID 1 w/4TB drives takes hours if not days to rebuild, house fire/flood/theft/lightning strike will not preserve files, and so on.

Think of RAID as if you loose a drive, you can continue working at or near the current level or performance, but that is all. Purely continuity and very little protection.

 

[alzan]

I'm not overly impressed by the device or it's specs but now that you have it; definitely have a backup scheme in place unless you want to wait days for a rebuild to complete if one of the drives goes south. Use Acronis TrueImage to make an occasional clone of your data to an external drive.

 

[Cerb]

Mac folk use those kinds of RAID enclosures, but typically for RAID 0 or JBOD.

If you don't need the availability, a backup is generally better to have than a redundant type of RAID array.

A RAID 1 should not take days to rebuild, but several hours, which is one of the benefits of RAID 1/10 over parity RAIDs (typically, the rebuild speed is throttled, so that the array is usable while rebuilding, else it would take only as long as reading the drive from end to end, around 3 hours).

But, as far as how well it protects you, you are at the mercy of the controller inside. RAID adds complexity and fragility, so any RAID's quality is dependent upon the quality of the hardware and software put into it. *n*x software RAID, including new file systems, and LSI's hardware RIAD, are among the highest quality you will come across. Windows' is meh, and Intel's is reliable, but not ideal (it sometimes requires reboots that it really shouldn't to rebuild successfully, so I wouldn't want it in a business environment if I could help it, when LSIs are so cheap; but it's pretty solid, even with having to fight to make it rebuild, sometimes).

I wouldn't trust RAID in such an enclosure, myself.