RAID/SSD's

[ebscreen]

Internet won't give me a straight answer.

We backup already, but I'm realizing that a reinstall of a backup would likely take hours, several of them. And it would
be at the worst possible time of course.

I'd like to RAID 1 our machines, but they all use SSD's, and I'm not sure if they play along, or if it's even worth it.
Doing it via motherboard/controller if that makes a difference.

Also, for those of you doing"carbon copy" type backups, how do you deal with open files? From my understanding
it's not a good idea to copy files that are currently open, IE Quickbooks etc, any unsaved data currently in cache
can corrupt the backup rendering it useless, especially with shared files. The "save as" command from within the
program is usually acceptable however, but requires manual or scripted usage.

[Frog]

My last box had a raid array, and required two identical drives. I'm figuring that it don't care whether they're mechanical or solid state but need to be the same.

[ebscreen]

Yep, I've got that much down. I'd imagine using a lesser quality drive would degrade performance of the first one as well,
and there's no point in doing that.

[Gilligan]

Here is the easiest solution.

Ssd for the os drive and store data on raid 1 platter drives.

Speed won't be terrible where it counts and it will give your data redundancy.

You may lose the machine (os drive) but you could slap the raid into a spare machine and be back up pretty quickly.

[jvanick]

for pretty much any raid level, you want the performance of the drives to be the same.

reason being the OS doesn't get 'confirmation' that the 'write' is complete until the last drive has finished writing the data.   There are raid controllers with battery backed cache memory, but even those will slow down when the cache gets full.

Gilligan is right on with his suggestion..  Raid 1 is always a good plan too, as typically those drives can be read on any computer with a usb drive dock (vs raid 5 which requires the same exact controller)

[UnderPressureSP]

I put one of these in and I can say my data writing lag has went away for the most part.  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820228113   I also have 2 SSD drives and a regular hard drive.  SSD work better for raids than normal hard drives.  Its all how your system is made and where your programs are placed.  Adding a 4 hard drive setup was one of the best things I did for my computer work flow this year.       

[GraphicDisorder]

We have each machine with SSD drives where OS/Programs live.  Each machine has a data drive which is just a normal internal drive (large).  We like this as some files are super big and opening over the network has a slight hesitation on big ones.  Our server which is running raid then copies each machine at night. So we have 2 copies at least of each machine. In addition each machine as a external copying the data drive at night. Somewhat over kill but I have never lost anything doing it this way.

[blue moon]

I've had multiple multi thousand dollar RAID setups (with hardware controllers) fail and cause significant issues. Since then I keep it simple. Server has a mirror with set up directly from the factory (IBM/Lenovo) to reduce the potential of hardware incompatibility. It is using regular hard drives as they are faster than what the network will support. Systems are backed up to the server and the server itself has an internal drive to back up everything and external drives to back that up (one is in a fireproof/waterproof safe).

Here's something to think about, most airplane manufacturers have gone from 4 engines back to two. They found that introducing more engines caused more frequent problems without really delivering more reliability. So they switched back to two engines per plane . . .

Also, spending half a day to restore from backup is not the end of the world. It should not be happening at all, but taking a little longer once in 10 years probably has a better ROI than a complicated backup solution.

pierre

[ebscreen]

Here is the easiest solution.

Ssd for the os drive and store data on raid 1 platter drives.

I forgot to mention that's how we have our machines setup already. I would actually rather
raid the OS drive because that would be the majority of our time recovering from a failure,
reinstalling all of our programs etc. Storage is just that, a fairly long copy time and we'd
be done.

We have each machine with SSD drives where OS/Programs live.  Each machine has a data drive which is just a normal internal drive (large).  We like this as some files are super big and opening over the network has a slight hesitation on big ones.  Our server which is running raid then copies each machine at night. So we have 2 copies at least of each machine. In addition each machine as a external copying the data drive at night. Somewhat over kill but I have never lost anything doing it this way.

Makes sense. How would you be in case of fire/theft though? Those are the two that get me, we've got a drive literally in the wall
for theft, but fire would kill us there. As is I take home a drive every week with out two most important files (quickbooks and our database).

I've had multiple multi thousand dollar RAID setups (with hardware controllers) fail and cause significant issues. Since then I keep it simple. Server has a mirror with set up directly from the factory (IBM/Lenovo) to reduce the potential of hardware incompatibility. It is using regular hard drives as they are faster than what the network will support. Systems are backed up to the server and the server itself has an internal drive to back up everything and external drives to back that up (one is in a fireproof/waterproof safe).

Here's something to think about, most airplane manufacturers have gone from 4 engines back to two. They found that introducing more engines caused more frequent problems without really delivering more reliability. So they switched back to two engines per plane . . .

Also, spending half a day to restore from backup is not the end of the world. It should not be happening at all, but taking a little longer once in 10 years probably has a better ROI than a complicated backup solution.

pierre

I knew you had mentioned a harddrive in a safe, and when I asked the droids at Fry's (a brick and mortar Newegg for those not familiar) they
laughed at me "you can't run cables into a safe and have it be fireproof, no such thing". I'll look again.

I think you're right Pierre about the complicated backup solution, the more I try and plan for every possible scenario
just adds layers and layers of potential problems. KISS.


Thanks for your input everyone, more to chew on. Any one have any thoughts on backing up open/shared files such as Quickbooks etc?
Another computer myth?

[GraphicDisorder]

Makes sense. How would you be in case of fire/theft though? Those are the two that get me, we've got a drive literally in the wall
for theft, but fire would kill us there. As is I take home a drive every week with out two most important files (quickbooks and our database).

We bring a drive in (monthly) and back it up and take it home.  BUT I am guilty of not doing it as often as I should.  I really need to come up with a process on that and make sure I do it. 

[blue moon]

Here is the easiest solution.

Ssd for the os drive and store data on raid 1 platter drives.

I forgot to mention that's how we have our machines setup already. I would actually rather
raid the OS drive because that would be the majority of our time recovering from a failure,
reinstalling all of our programs etc. Storage is just that, a fairly long copy time and we'd
be done.

We have each machine with SSD drives where OS/Programs live.  Each machine has a data drive which is just a normal internal drive (large).  We like this as some files are super big and opening over the network has a slight hesitation on big ones.  Our server which is running raid then copies each machine at night. So we have 2 copies at least of each machine. In addition each machine as a external copying the data drive at night. Somewhat over kill but I have never lost anything doing it this way.

Makes sense. How would you be in case of fire/theft though? Those are the two that get me, we've got a drive literally in the wall
for theft, but fire would kill us there. As is I take home a drive every week with out two most important files (quickbooks and our database).

I've had multiple multi thousand dollar RAID setups (with hardware controllers) fail and cause significant issues. Since then I keep it simple. Server has a mirror with set up directly from the factory (IBM/Lenovo) to reduce the potential of hardware incompatibility. It is using regular hard drives as they are faster than what the network will support. Systems are backed up to the server and the server itself has an internal drive to back up everything and external drives to back that up (one is in a fireproof/waterproof safe).

Here's something to think about, most airplane manufacturers have gone from 4 engines back to two. They found that introducing more engines caused more frequent problems without really delivering more reliability. So they switched back to two engines per plane . . .

Also, spending half a day to restore from backup is not the end of the world. It should not be happening at all, but taking a little longer once in 10 years probably has a better ROI than a complicated backup solution.

pierre

I knew you had mentioned a harddrive in a safe, and when I asked the droids at Fry's (a brick and mortar Newegg for those not familiar) they
laughed at me "you can't run cables into a safe and have it be fireproof, no such thing". I'll look again.

I think you're right Pierre about the complicated backup solution, the more I try and plan for every possible scenario
just adds layers and layers of potential problems. KISS.


Thanks for your input everyone, more to chew on. Any one have any thoughts on backing up open/shared files such as Quickbooks etc?
Another computer myth?

http://www.amazon.com/SentrySafe-SFW123GTF-Electronic-Connection-Cubic/dp/B00LU1UQG6

pierre

[ebscreen]

http://www.amazon.com/SentrySafe-SFW123GTF-Electronic-Connection-Cubic/dp/B00LU1UQG6

pierre

IN  YOUR FACE FRYS NERDS!!!

[blue moon]

I should mention that the safe is not burglar proof regardless of what they SentrySafe would like you to believe. Even with the significantly beefed up steel bars to close the doors, it can be opened with a strong magnet or a pry bar in less than a minute! It looks like a safe, it acts like a safe, it is sold as a safe, but alas it is just a duck . . .

pierre

[ZooCity]

Pierre, that's exactly what we need.   Not so much for the theft protection but the fire protection.  I'm going to look for a thunderbolt or usb 3.0 version.

We are moving from cloud storage to a local network....someday.  I setup the hardware to minimize downtime.  I haven't ran this all yet so this is just talk but here it is:

• Server has 2 large platter drives, mirrored.  The server is a common type of computer in our shop.
• External drive 1 (lacie rugged) connected via thunderbolt is carbon copying the server. And if we run it in one of these nifty safes it's now fireproof.
• External drive 2 is in a safe deposit box.  Our bank sends a courier whenever we like and we typically run deposits a few times a week so the data on this drive will be no more than 1-2 days behind.
• Backblaze, a web service, is backing up everything on all machines for version retrieval and to make for total redundancy.  Sounds way easier than having umpteen external drives connected to every computer for this, it's fast for smaller retrievals and it's all offsite.

In our case we're using macs so the server machine is a Mac Mini.  We have quite a few other mac minis of similar vintage and a spare one waiting in the wings.  Should both the platter drives in the server or the server machine itself crap out, we simply grab the backup mini, plug in the external and copy back over.  Very little downtime and no big to do with restoring, especially with the thunderbolt connection.   You can sub in whatever windows machines here and get the same or probably better results. 

[Gilligan]

I forgot to mention that's how we have our machines setup already. I would actually rather
raid the OS drive because that would be the majority of our time recovering from a failure,
reinstalling all of our programs etc. Storage is just that, a fairly long copy time and we'd
be done.

EB,

You could just image the OS drive once you get it setup like you want.  You could even take a spare drive, clone it and then just let it sit for that day the OS shits the bed.  You could run the cloning process from time to time to keep it updated.

To do raid 1 properly I think you need hardware and as Pierre said, it's picky.

I have a client that uses Raid 1 for his boot drives... the whole server MUST be running... it's running a raid 1 card and he has a second one sitting on a shelf in case that card shits the bed.  He can't afford to be down and he has to pay for it.

It would be cheaper to do what I'm suggesting, but he has lost 2-3 hard drives since I built the system and he's never known.  The card just emails me, I get a new drive and go install it.  He's only down for a few minutes during lunch.

My production manager's PC flipped out on us the other day (hard drive controller driver issue)... he just moved over to another PC to get his work done while I sorted it all out.