On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 04:38:04PM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 20 December 2017 at 14:52, Paul Tansom paul@aptanet.com wrote:
RAID wise, I always use the Linux software RAID to mirror my drives.
Agreed.
There is a very big advantage when your hardware fails (it will!!) that you have a RAID technology that transfers between hardware, and that you can take your drive out of the failed hardware, stick it into a USB caddy and access the data from any Linux PC.
For that reason, I only use RAID1 whenever possible; recovering your data from one drive of a redundant pair is much easier than trying to reconfigure a (eg) RAID5 array to get data off.
I've never really seen any need for RAID on a home system. I make sure everything is safely backed up and go with the OS on an SSD and /home on a big rotating one.
The only drive I've had die within the last few years was the short-term backup one which lives in my desktop server. It wasn't *totally* dead so I simply copied what was OK onto a new drive and carried on. Even if it had been totally dead all I would have lost would have been incremental backups for the past few hours.