I have not yet signed up for a server. I was wondering about the Plesk backups.

Would it make sense to get (2) 40 gig drives instead of one 80 gig drive? That way I would have a seperate drive for backups. Is this a decent idea or is my head lodged?

Thanks in advance.

Well, if you do not need the full 80gb and if 40gb is big enough for you then the 40 gb x 2 is not a bad idea for the local backup. It is not a foolproof method but at least it can be a nice backup solution which allows you to retrieve damage files or in case of a disk replacement you could restore the files.

I am however not sure abot Plesk and if it has a built-in automated backup solution so I cannot comment on that.

By the way, which Operating System are you opting for ? If you are doing Windows, you could enable the built-in Software based RAID solution. This will make an image of the main drive. In times of failure, it could be used to resync the data over.

Alternatively, you could take a look at the Disk Sync solution they have here. It is a remote backup solution so even if your entire machine is toast, you can still restore your data.


Backups is always a good thing.

Thank you for the advice. Yeah 40 GB will be amble, so I think I'll head in that direction.

I'll be opting for a Windows machine. I wasn't aware of the built-in RAID solution -- this will be my first dedicated server. That sounds like a very cool idea as well.

Thanks again, I think I'll go ahead with the order in the morning.

Yes, I only found out about it a month or so ago.

All you need to do is go under Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management and select Disk Management and convert both drives from Basic to 'Dynamic' mode. Then you could set up the Disk Mirroring.

Once you are set, it would begin the mirroring.

Have fun.

If there is no real urgency to get the server now, you might want to wait a week or two. They are in the midst of preparing to open a new datacenter and when they do, there would be specials and you could be saving.

Of course if you need it now then that is another story altogether.

I'm looking at the 2.4 Celeron for $89/month. Do you think the specials will be better than that?

I have really no idea but for the $0 setup, it is really a great deal.

eddy, how realiable have you found the built in windows software raid?

Does it use much system resources?

Thanks

No real performance hit here but then again, the mission critical state of the site is over but during that stage, I did not notice any slowdown.

Resources usage is almost nothing.. I have not done a restore as yet but I did reboot the system while it was in the midst of building the RAID just to test and after the reboot, it continued on its work after some checks and I was on my way. If I recall correctly, only during the initial seeding that there is some sort of loads, there would be but not as tragic as doing say a proper backup.

Where can I find more information about this?

I want to know if it is really reliable. What would happen if one drive is suddenly taken away? or if one gets corrupt will the other one also get corrupt?

There must be some kind of disadvantage over hardware otherwise no one would use hardware raid.

Thanks

I would think that there are several disadvantages to software RAID. From what I could see, if the primary drive dies, it would not be smart enough to switch to the secondary mirrored drive to run thus no mission critical operations here. Also once you get the primary drive installed, you need to load the OS and then once you are done, set up the primary and secondary drive relationship then have it restore the data. It is just basically mirroring data and nothing much else.

With a hardware RAID, it would have control over the disk controller or have its own disk controller which can do seamless switching upon the detection of a failure. If hot-swap is enable, it can continue working while the primary drive get swap and would be smart to reseed it when a new drive is installed.

It depends on what level of RAID you require. If it is mission critical then a hardware RAID makes sense. If you do not mind the downtime then the software one should do the trick.

Anyways, that how I see it.

If the primary hard disk fails what would I have to do? Ask the DC to swap the drives so that the secondary drive becomes primary?

This would still be much better than with conventional backups. Swapping the drives wont take more than 1 hour and data will be intact and up to date.

I think I will give it a try.

If your primary drive fails, ask the DC to replaced that drive and reload it with Windows 2003 then convert the drive as dynamic and assume the Mirroring relationship. I am sure when you do that, the Disk Mirroring would resync everything over and in probably an hour or so (depending on how huge the disk size), you should be up and running.

But doesn't the software raid create an identical copy of the primary hard drive on the secondary hard drive?

If it is like that then I should be able to just switch drives and be up and running in minutes. Then later on I could rebuild the array again with the new hard drive.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks

I would supposed that should be the way. I've not tried it in practise yet.

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