nVidia nForce RAID

[Frank]

Well, I have about a terabyte of stuff at home, stored on many disks. While most of it probably isn't that interesting, I really want a good backup of some of it. And I hate burning it all on DVD. Although, I trust tapes even less. And a single high-storage tape is more expensive than a harddisk. And, as my motherboard (Asus K8N4-E) supports RAID through the nForce4 chipset, I gave it a go.

So, I bought two 320 GB harddisks, and made them into a RAID 1 (mirror) volume. Windows didn't recognise it (as expected), so I installed the nForce drivers. And my computer crashed with a blue screen every time when trying to boot.

Hm.

Try again, and only install the RAID drivers. Although they replace the native windows IDE drivers, and it took me multiple reboots and fixes to get them working.

Ok, so I did have bad experience with nForce drivers (and ESPECIALLY their hardware firewall) at customers, but that was all about a year ago. Nothing seems to have changed, unfortunately.



Anyway, I managed to get my RAID array up and running. But I'm not sure if I can trust it to hold my dear data. For starters, if the motherboard breaks down, is there still a way to put that array in a new computer and retaining the data, even if I cannot buy a motherboard with an nForce4 anymore?

Opinions?

 

[{Sniping}Waste]

What I have always done was use ghost to save data. You might look at a seagate 750gig drive and ghost your raid to that once a week over night.

 

[Frank]

Btw, an alternative would be building a new Linux server and using software RAID. But I want to get rid of all the old stuff. I have too many already. And I want to keep the PC I'm now using as server running Windows.

 

[Frank]

What I have always done was use ghost to save data. You might look at a seagate 750gig drive and ghost your raid to that once a week over night.

Yes, I bought three 250 GB USB disks over the last year to use for that, although I didn't use Ghost. I'm only interested in the data.

But after a while, I need the storage (you know how it goes), and the data and backup becomes scattered over all the disks. So I would prefer a method that doesn't allow me to use the storage for other things. And tapes are out. That leaves RAID.

And I haven't got the money for a "real" SCSI RAID.

 

[Jawed]

You could buy an external RAID box (plugs in with USB or eSATA, your mobo prolly doesn't have eSATA though) and fit it with two of your existing drives.

That way the box does RAID-1 and you don't have to worry about stupid mobos.

Alternatively you could buy a box that can connect using a LAN connection (network attached storage, NAS).

These boxes aren't too expensive now. But it's worth reading around.

I'm gonna be doing something along these lines soon, I have a terabyte or so of stuff that I no longer want to keep on DVD.

Jawed