Vista x64 RAID setup

[WowbaggerTIP]

I'm planning to setup a new system for some software development work, and I am trying to plan some things out so that I don't paint myself into a corner. First of all, here's the core of what I'm planning to build:

Core i7 920
Asus P6T Deluxe v2
12GB (6 x 2GB) Corsair XMS3 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)
3x Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB
Vista Ultimate x64

What I want to do is set up Windows on the first drive, and then put the other two into a RAID 1 (mirrored) setup. I'll be storing a lot of VMs on these and want to make sure that I have that redundancy.

Now to the questions. The motherboard has a RAID controller built-in that does RAID 1, so that would work for this. My concern is about what to do if the motherboard ever dies, or I upgrade later. Will another motherboard be able to read the drives? How do you migrate them from one system to another when you upgrade your motherboard? I tend to upgrade at least every couple years, so this is an issue for me.

I'd prefer to run software RAID, but Vista apparently isn't capable of it. I've read that Windows 7 isn't going to support software RAID 1 either. I've also read that Server 2008 can do it, but I'm not sure I want to load that up as my primary OS.

Anyone have any info or advice on this? What's the best way to do this?

Thanks!

 

[RebateMonger]

It'd be simpler to skip the RAID and put in a good backup system. Then you can change motherboards or hard drives as often as you like and just restore the data to the new system.

If you ABSOLUTELY have to have the data available at all times, then RAID 1 is a different story (although RAID arrays fail, too). But, while hard drives certainly do fail, the "average" time between failures is several years and the added complication and migration worries resulting from the use of a RAID array might not be worth it when you could restore an entire failed 750 GB data drive from backups in a couple of hours if needed.

 

[WowbaggerTIP]

Ok, so what would you recommend as a backup plan when dealing with a bunch of 20-40GB VM files? Just run some sort of backup software to copy them from one drive to another? Do it manually? I'm really open to ideas since I haven't really had to worry much about backups before. I've tended to back up my important stuff on DVDs. I've had a few drives fail on me. Usually after at least couple years or so, but a couple times it happened within the first year (remember the IBM DeathStar? )

Anyway, I just need to be able to make sure that I can restore the files fairly quickly if need be, and keep the original vhd files along with the differentials stored in more than one place so that I don't have to worry about losing anything.

 

[imported_wired247]

it's nice backing up to an external HDD. There are always occasional stories about power surges or PSU failures taking down "all the internal HDDs in my computer at once" while external HDDs should have their own power supply which you should hook up to a surge protector to prevent such a thing.


check out acronis true image, it is a nice backup software and has some nice on the fly compression to save you quite a bit of space when backing stuff up. you can also do scheduling with incremental backups if you like, so it's basically fully automatic...



that said I'll never tell someone to skip RAID if they have the resources to do it. the HDD is still the most likely to fail device in your average computer at any given time, except for maybe a fan.

 

[WowbaggerTIP]

Yeah, but I'm still wary of hardware RAID solutions due to lack of portability and component failure. If my motherboard were to fail (which has happened to me before), then I'd have to buy another board with the same controller to get access to my data again, right? That's one of the main reasons I was interested in a software RAID solution. Just can't seem to get that with Vista or Win7 apparently.

 

[MerlinRML]

Originally posted by: WowbaggerTIP
Yeah, but I'm still wary of hardware RAID solutions due to lack of portability and component failure. If my motherboard were to fail (which has happened to me before), then I'd have to buy another board with the same controller to get access to my data again, right? That's one of the main reasons I was interested in a software RAID solution. Just can't seem to get that with Vista or Win7 apparently.

If you're using Intel Matrix RAID, you can pretty much connect the disks to any Intel chipset that supports Matrix RAID and it will be able to read the RAID metadata on the drives and give you access to your data. The same is supposed to be true on nvidia chipsets.

Also, I stumbled across RAID2RAID a while ago, and it should be able to access any chipset RAID on any chipset. I haven't tried it yet or heard from anyone that has, but it's interesting enough that I plan to take a look at it...someday.

Of course, if your motherboard failure corrupts the data on the drives, all bets are off.