Asus K8V Hard Drives

[tmamayek]

Alright. So the story is i need this comp for my home server. I am starting own biz and need to b sure not to lose some of the data. The other data is basically a lot of movies and crap like that. Here's what i have:

Thermaltake Xaser V daiemer case
Antec 450 watt dual fan power supply
3 x 512 mb kingston value ram 2700
AMD 64 3200
Asus K8V
4 x WD 200 gig SATA
3 x WD 250 gig IDE
1 x Ben-q 16x dual layer/dual format DVD burner

Basically, I know that this M/b has a lot of different options in regards to the RAID and crap. Ideally what i would like is to have the OS and programs raid'd so i can be 100% guarenteed not to lose the doc's and prog's. The other discs i would like for all storage. Please help me out. I have now had my XP screwed up so many times without even doing anything besides trying to install everything. I had it set up for 3 weeks and then my c drive failed with all of my important crap on it. I need this to be very reliable and perform nice. Advice would be greatly appreciated. You can also reply to my email, tmamayek@earthlink.net. Thanks in advance everyone.

 

[Disorganise]

G'day tmamayek,

I'm a bit confused....you say this is for a business but you mention 'raid'ing the OS and programs and leaving the other drives for storage.

Me? I can live with the OS and program giving up the ghost - I have copies of them on CD. What isn't so easy to retrieve (unless you have a solid back-up routine) is your business data.

I had a quick look at the Asus website, and it seems that you have the option of RAID 0 or 1 only (no RAID 5).
For business, RAID 0 is out - lose one drive in your array and ALL data in that array is lost. NOT a good look.

I'd probably set it up something like:
Since XP no longer has RAID 1 support built in like NT used to have, you'll need to configure your RAID 1 array from the relevant bios.
For the OS, I'd use 2 of the IDE drives, mainly 'cos they're more 'generic' and should cause less installation headaches

Next I'd set the SATA drives into 2 RAID 1 arrays (unless it's possible to RAID 0 2 drives and then mirror than array to the other 2 drives (RAID0+1)). All your business data will reside on these RAID 1 arrays.

The remaining IDE drive can be used for the pagefile and any unimportant data. eg a temp storage for movies etc.


Next I'd set up a batch file to call NTBackup at least once a week and preferably daily.
Back-up the OS to one of the SATA RAID 1 arrays - This makes it fairly easy to restore your settings in a disaster. simply install the os, then restore from the file located on the sata drives.
Also back-up the critical business infor to a file on the OS drives (maybe create a separate partition for this)
Be sure to dump the files off to the DVD regularly too so you're covered against EMP etc

All is all you'll get 650GB of highly redundant space. To put things into perspective, our company has over 400 users in our building and our file server is now 600GB - and it's only that big 'cos we all went soft. most of the data is duplicated!

Whatever you do, stay away from RAID0! It's great for throughput but is extremely risky for business data. eg, you put the 4 SATA drives in RAID 0 and you'll get a huge 800GB of space available to you, but there's 4 times the opportunity to lose your data - eg, say there's a 10% chance of a single drive failing, by putting 4 together, there's a 40% chance of 1 of them failing. With RAID0, 1 drive fails, all data is lost.

Dave