Raid 5 Back-up system

[ricktas]

Spent some time yesterday building myself a raid 5 backup system. Bought the box, and a couple of new 1tb hard drives, and combined them with 2 existing 1tb hard drives I already had. Got the box all put together and accessible across my wireless network yesterday.

Well this morning I decide to set it up in the Raid 5 configuration ready for using as my new backup solution. Well 5 hours in and its at 26% done. Did some googling and seems formatting and setting up 4 x 1tb drives in a Raid 5 array can take ages, some people have found it takes days to complete.

So just a nice little warning, if you want to setup your own Raid 5, be prepared for it to take quite a while to get to the point where you can actually backup onto it.

[Lani]

Glad it's you, Rick...patience isn't one of my strong points. Will be fantastic once it's up and running tho.

Curious if one HD fails. is it easy to just slot another one into the setup, or have got to go through the whole process again.

[ricktas]

Glad it's you, Rick...patience isn't one of my strong points. Will be fantastic once it's up and running tho.

Curious if one HD fails. is it easy to just slot another one into the setup, or have got to go through the whole process again.

If one fails, slot a new one in and the system will rebuild itself and no data loss.

I'm going to backup all my previous photos to it, and then set it up so that as new photos are transferred from my camera(memory card) to my pc, it will grab them at the same time and back them up to the Raid system, instantly and automatically. No running weekly backups etc, it will just happen.

[trigger]

Just remember that the RAID controllers can fail too. Mine failed and it started to write corrupted data into all my hard drives

If one fails, slot a new one in and the system will rebuild itself and no data loss.