1
1
I have 2 Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB HDD in RAID 1 using Intel Rapid Storage Technology. I use them as a storage volume, that is not accessed very frequently, and most importantly, that is not written to very often. This made me think that a continuous RAID-1 might not be the best solution to ensuring the safety of my data as it is at risk of accidental overwrite, viruses, and corrupted data.
I think a backup solution would suite my situation better (backing up the first HDD onto the second). As I was looking for ways to achieve this, I noticed you can change the update mode of the RAID-1 to be "On Request". This could effectively be used as backup, or I think it could.
Am I right to think that the "on request" mode basically turns the raid into a backup solution?
If so, does anyone know the advantages/disadvantages of using RAID-1 in "on request" mode as a backup solution over a software backup program with 2 non-raid HDD?
Finally, is there a way to automatically schedule the "on request"?
Thank You.
I understand how the best situation would be to have raid for fault tolerance, and have the raid backed up on an external drive. What I'm not sure I understand is why raid in a "per request" mode is not a backup. The old adage "raid is not a backup" used to make sense to me, until I found this "on request" mode. Now wouldn't that just be like having the raid driver copy the files, instead of having a backup software do it? – Didier A. – 2011-07-20T06:26:56.077
@didibus I won't deny you a point. But the procedures for recovering of this type of "backup" are just too cumbersome compared to more traditional methods. Here you are asked to remove disks, move them around and so forth. Neither you have a straightforward means to recover just portions of data (just these files, just those directories) after some incident corrupts or accidentally deletes your files. Essentially RAID-1 offers no backup recovery features. Simply hardware fault recovery. – A Dwarf – 2011-07-20T09:29:46.763