RAID Discomfort

A few years ago, in one of my first steps to alleviate storage constriction, I established a striped raid drive to turn my two 1TB drives into a single 2TB drive. I was never terribly comfortable with this, but I leveraged Microsoft's SyncToy in an effort to ensure we wouldn't lose too much data in the even of a catastrophe. 

This system has been in place for quite some time now and it has worked fairly well. SyncToy stopped performing its regular backups some months ago, but I ignored the problem and occasionally did manual preservation. It hasn't been a big deal. 

With a server rebuild, though, I felt it was finally time to start from scratch with the RAID drives and build them all fresh with the new install. This is great, but I am loathe to replicate the vulnerabilities of the striped drive I was using before. The problem with this decision, of course, is that it leaves me fully 1TB short on data storage. So, what is the solution?

I've also been running two mirrored 2TB drives. The solution, then, is to transform these two 2TB mirrors into a single 5.3TB parity drive. This also is of some concern to me, though. RAID 5 is - or can be - a great solution. However, there is still an fairly unacceptable level of risk associated with it. If the drive fails, then one must find an appropriate drive to replace it with. This can often mean finding a much larger drive and calling it even. If the drive fails and the controller cannot rebuild it, then all of the data is lost anyway because parity. 

In some ways, I've thought of RAID 5 as a solution even riskier than striping. This is nonsense, of course, since a striped array has no chance of recovery while a parity array at least has the illusion of a chance. Mirrored arrays, of course, are the epitome of data comfort and security, since the failure of a drive doesn't even slow access to the data. But I can't afford mirrored at this point. I've run out of storage.

Well, I can't afford mirrored for the largest drives. For the smaller drive holding our photo album and documents, mirrored is the way to go, and it is the way I will be going. 

This marks my first foray into a parity array. Perhaps it is just foolish superstition that has kept me away for so long. I don't know. I just know that if I look around online, there are a wealth of horror stories to be found about the experience. And that scares me.