With SSD storage, what what your thoughts on redundant storage devices (e.g RAID1), is it a waste, a nice to have or a must?
what are your experiences and thoughts on this ?
Appreciate your opinion, as I will probably move from HDD to SSD.
It depends how valuable your data is, what backup strategy you have, and how long you’re prepared to wait to get access to your data when a drive fails.
Personally if/when I migrate my main dataset to SSD, I’ll stick with RAIDZ2/RAID6.
I’m quite disappointed by most comments so far talking about RAID and data loss. That is not what RAID is for at all.
RAID is for uptime/availability. When a drive fails, the system will keep running and working. For companies, that would lose thousands of currency per hour with a downtime, this is super important that the system keeps running. At home, it’s convenience that you can order a new drive and replace without hours of setting up and copying before you can watch the next episode again.
Backups are against data loss. If a single drive fails, a RAID fails or you get some encryption malware or an employee destroys stuff on purpose, then everything is destroyed. It doesn’t matter if it was a single, any RAID, HDD or SSD. You order a new drive, make a new volume and restore the data from your backup.
Well, more specifically it is protecting against a specific form of data loss, which is hardware failure. A good practice if you’re able is to have RAID and an offsite/cloud backup solution.
But if you don’t, don’t feel terrible. When the OVH datacentre had a fire, I lost my server there. But so did a lot of businesses. You’d be amazed at how many had no backup and were demanding that OVH somehow pry their smouldering drives from what remained of the datacentre wing and salvage all the data.
If you care about your data, you want a backup that is off-site. Cloud backup is quite inexpensive these days.
