What's RAID?
Depending upon who you ask, and for no discernible reason, RAID is an acronym - Redundant Array of Independent Disks or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. How there came to be two definitions is lost to the mists of time but I'm happy with either. For those who don't know anything of this it is a principle of sharing your data across two or more hard drives in order to either increase performance, provide more hard drive space or provide some level of protection against the scourge of reality - broken parts and wear and tear. In other words our nonsensical "value" is redundancy. This latter reason is why I've done this.
RAID is not.. I'll repeat that.. RAID IS NOT a get out of jail free card for those who choose not to perform data backups. It is not a substitute so don't be fooled.. keep doing those backups. If you value your data but don't do backups then shame on you, and people more cruel than I would say you deserve everything potentially coming to you.
There are different practical implementations of RAID, from RAID 0, 1, 5, 10.. We won't go into too much detail here but I've elected for RAID 1, which essentially means that I have two hard drives of equal capacity set up to function as a mirror or clone. Both drives contain exactly the same data, thus enabling a scenario whereby if one drive were to (re. will inevitably) suffer hardware failure no data is actually lost and I the user can continue happily, suffering only the anguish of knowing that the failed drive needs replacing ASAP as opposed to crying into his coffee over his lost data, particularly if he hasn't been doing backups. Once replaced the system will copy its data from the good drive to the new one and you're back to business as usual!
One caveat to my plan is that I'm running a 2Tb system but only have a 1Tb backup drive.. I trust you see the problem with this. To that end my next goal is to increase the size of the backup drive and that can only be done in this case by a new purchase.. alas no technological development that I know of allows you to simply nail or glue extra space onto a hard disk. This too however is a part of my near future rationale. It occurs to me that in times of fiscal strife the best way I could proceed is to replace my 1Tb external backup drive with a 4Tb drive - given that a 4Tb drive is "only" £20 or so more than a 2Tb drive makes justification quite simple.
Why 4Tb?
The least advisable and yet strangely popular RAID scheme is RAID 0, which combines your drives into one. In my case that would double the capacity of my drive space from 2Tb to 4Tb, but also compromise physical integrity in a very inadvisable direction. With RAID 0 your data is alternately written to both drives which means that you have your expected capacity increase and you gain an increase in read performance for your data. However since you're spreading your data over two drives you also double your chances of suffering mechanical failure since you now have two drives to worry about. Worse still if one goes t*ts up then you only have half of your data, and since that data is only every other bit then what remains intact is less use than a dolls head. This is why RAID 0 is pretty bad.. you don't get something for nothing. That said, if I was running out of space, absolutely needed the data space and had absolutely no chance of affording an upgrade for my hard drives then I could opt for a RAID 0 configuration to increase my working space to 4Tb and manage with regular backups to protect my data, until such time as I could afford to expand things.. hence a 4Tb external drive would cover me in this instance. Another route would be to use the 4Tb drive to store the excess work - at least that would only represent a single drive failure problem!?
Anyway at the end of the day it's all about protecting your data, assuming it matters to you. If it doesn't then forget everything I just described. As an aside, as I type the PC has already performed 21% of the task of synchronising the drive contents - yes it's doing it in the background as I write this.
Another advantage I experienced this morning going through the hassles of installing another hard drive is that it gave me another opportunity/excuse to indulge in cable management. I managed a slight but noticeable increase in quality.
Alas I have no before and after shots worthy for comparison so you'll have to take my word for it, but I think it looks quite tidy now - something to be revered in a system which relies on airflow to keep the volume of space within the chassis within a good operating temperature.
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