Setting up a *Safe* Disk system (Raid-1, Cooling Caddy)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Wayne Youngman
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Wayne Youngman

Hi,

I want to set-up a nice disk system that is protected from data loss. My
friend just gave me his old PROMISE Fast-Trax100 card (IDE RAID PCI card)
which I have installed into my older machine. So I have been researching
the prices on 80/120/160GB drives.

The case I will be fitting the new drives too doesn't have enough space for
many drives inside so I am considering buying two *cooling* bay caddies that
fit into the CD-ROM bays.

What do you think of these:

COOLERMASTER *Cooldrive3* (cost less than £20-00 Inc vat)
http://tinyurl.com/3b73o

So I would have two of these, each holding a IDE drive configured in RAID-1.
To me that sounds like a pretty good investment, but perhaps a bit OTT?
 
Wayne said:
Hi,

I want to set-up a nice disk system that is protected from data loss. My
friend just gave me his old PROMISE Fast-Trax100 card (IDE RAID PCI card)
which I have installed into my older machine. So I have been researching
the prices on 80/120/160GB drives.

The case I will be fitting the new drives too doesn't have enough space
for many drives inside so I am considering buying two *cooling* bay
caddies that fit into the CD-ROM bays.

What do you think of these:

COOLERMASTER *Cooldrive3* (cost less than £20-00 Inc vat)
http://tinyurl.com/3b73o

So I would have two of these, each holding a IDE drive configured in
RAID-1. To me that sounds like a pretty good investment, but perhaps a bit
OTT?
Click to expand...

If you go over to <http://forums.silentpcreview.com/search.php>, put
keywords "coolermaster cooldrive" in the search block and click "search for
all terms" then hit the search you'll find several articles discussing this
with some links to reviews.

The conclusion seems to be that the Cooldrive 3 will hold the drive in
place, keep it at about the same temperature it would have had without the
Cooldrive 3, and keep it at about the same noise level it would have had
without the Cooldrive 3--in other words if your intention is to just have
something to hold the drive then it should work fine.

You can get a drive mounting bracket for $2 or so that does pretty much the
same thing--if you feel you need extra cooling you can get drive coolers in
a number of configurations for $5 or so.
 
Have you considered an external USB or Firewire drive?

I bought the Coolmax CD-510B Combo (USB/Firewire) from www.newegg.com and
got a 160GB, 8MB cache Western Digital HD from Office max ($80 after
rebates), less than 2 weeks ago. Works fine with Norton 2003 Ghost and the
NTBackup built into XP. Office Max has a sale on WD HDs this week
too...120GB=$60, USB external 80GB=$70.

I plan to use it to make weekly backups of my desktop and my daughters
laptop. I un-attach it from the computers after the backup is completed.
 
"J. Clarke" wrote
If you go over to <http://forums.silentpcreview.com/search.php>, put
keywords "coolermaster cooldrive" in the search block and click "search for
all terms" then hit the search you'll find several articles discussing this
with some links to reviews.

The conclusion seems to be that the Cooldrive 3 will hold the drive in
place, keep it at about the same temperature it would have had without the
Cooldrive 3, and keep it at about the same noise level it would have had
without the Cooldrive 3--in other words if your intention is to just have
something to hold the drive then it should work fine.

You can get a drive mounting bracket for $2 or so that does pretty much the
same thing--if you feel you need extra cooling you can get drive coolers in
a number of configurations for $5 or so.
Click to expand...


Hi,
thanks for reply. Hmm it seems like this particular cooling caddy has mixed
reviews. I'm not so concerned about the noise levels but just wanted to
give me RAID-1 drives a little help in running cool. There are some more
options that I will have to look at (VANTEC, etc). It seems that hard
drives are the most temperature sensitive inside my PC, I hear that they
don't like to hit temps much above 50-55°c and that if they are kept cool,
then this will help to prolong their lives.

Hmm maybe I will have to rigg up something internally.
 
What's the point of RAID-1, unless you got some medical system that can't
fail for even a minute.

If you get a virus, both drives will be stuffed. If you stuff up windows in
some way, both drives will be stuffed.

If I were you, I'd keep the spare drive out of the PC in a removable drawer
and backup to it periodically.
 
Have you considered an external USB or Firewire drive?

I bought the Coolmax CD-510B Combo (USB/Firewire) from www.newegg.com and
got a 160GB, 8MB cache Western Digital HD from Office max ($80 after
rebates), less than 2 weeks ago. Works fine with Norton 2003 Ghost and the
NTBackup built into XP. Office Max has a sale on WD HDs this week
too...120GB=$60, USB external 80GB=$70.

I plan to use it to make weekly backups of my desktop and my daughters
laptop. I un-attach it from the computers after the backup is completed.
Click to expand...


Hi,
thanks for reply. Funnily enough I have just recently ordered a BELKIN
USB2.0 external casing, but that was intended to be used as a *portable*
disk backup solution. I fix peoples computers and sometimes I need to
backup 1-10GB of *My Documents* and the clients computers doesn't have a
network card, so I figured USB would be the way to go.

Since then (and while I have my credit card out the vault!) I wanted to add
a really secure disk system to my set-up. On my personal machine I have a
30GB IBM ATA/66 (System) and a 20GB IBM ATA/66(Data/My Document). But over
the past few years I have collected/encoded a heap of MP3/DivX etc which now
means I have just 1GB of space left on my Data drive. I just realised that
if that 20GB IBM ATA/66 (Data) disk was to *crumple* I would be stuffed.
Having said that both my IBM drives are over 4 years old now and still
working great, although I always did keep them cool.

Anyway as I said before I just got given a nice PROMISE ATA/100 PCI RAID
card which I have installed into my system, so I figured why not go for some
RAID-1 business, so I could buy 2 x 80GB drives and set-up it up as my new
DATA drive. . . resulting in 80GB of *Fault Redundant* disk goodness. Still
I may be tempted to get 2 x 120GB for 120GB of RAID-1.

I will keep looking into a suitable *housing* for my new RAID-1 drives,
probably will find something that looks and works well. I like the idea of
having a temperature readout of the Hard-Disks on the housing, that would
be interesting :P
--
Wayne ][

Barton (AQXEA) XP2500+ @ 2.2GHz (10x220) - 1.75vCore
CoolerMaster Aero 7 Lite - 3,200rpm
ABIT NF7-S v2.0 (BIOS d20)
512MB Dual TwiSTER PC3500 @ DDR440 1:1 (9,3,3,2.0 - 2.7v)
Sapphire Atlantis 9800 - 3.3ns Samsung (325/290 Default)
WD-SE 240GB (2x120GB) SATA RAID-0 (NTFS - 16k Stripe)
Antec SX630II Mini-Tower Case Inc 300w PSU
2 x CoolerMaster 80mm Blue Neon Fans
WinXP PRO inc. SP1
nVidia Unified v3.13
Cat 3.7 - DX9.0b
 
I want to set-up a nice disk system that is protected from data loss.
My friend just gave me his old PROMISE Fast-Trax100 card (IDE
RAID PCI card) which I have installed into my older machine.
So I have been researching the prices on 80/120/160GB drives.
Click to expand...
The case I will be fitting the new drives too doesn't have enough
space for many drives inside so I am considering buying two
*cooling* bay caddies that fit into the CD-ROM bays.
Click to expand...

You'll likely find that the drive temperature is fine just with
the drives mounted in 3.5" to 5.25" drive trays without fans.

You can always add a decent fan to that later if you need to.
What do you think of these:
Click to expand...
COOLERMASTER *Cooldrive3* (cost less
than £20-00 Inc vat) http://tinyurl.com/3b73o
Click to expand...
So I would have two of these, each holding a IDE drive configured in RAID-1.
To me that sounds like a pretty good investment, but perhaps a bit OTT?
Click to expand...

It is one way to protect yourself against hard drive failure.

It doesnt protect you against your own stupidity or a virus tho.
Only you can say how much of a risk those last two are for you.
 
What's the point of RAID-1, unless you got some medical system that can't
fail for even a minute.

If you get a virus, both drives will be stuffed. If you stuff up windows in
some way, both drives will be stuffed.

If I were you, I'd keep the spare drive out of the PC in a removable drawer
and backup to it periodically.
Click to expand...


Hi,
well I would be using the RAID-1 *only* as a data drive, that is the place I
keep all my personal stuff I collected over the years (pictures, docs,
MP3's, DivX etc). In all those years I haven't suffered any data loss, but
I have had a few friends whose drives have just *died*, like the motor has
gone or something heavy!. So it could be said that I have been *lucky*.
Well I don't wanna rely on luck anymore, so I figured RAID-1 would be a nice
easy system that would protect my data from a *Mechanical Drive Failure*,
that's the thing that scares me most about Hard-Disks, not viruses, or
Windows getting stuffed.

Your suggestion is still valid, that is having a removable Hard disk that
could be connected once a week to make backups, but I could still do that on
top of having Raid-1.

So to sum up my main fear is something *physically* failing on my drives,
therefore RAID-1 has a strong appeal to me. . . hope that makes my thoughts
clear
--
Wayne ][

Barton (AQXEA) XP2500+ @ 2.2GHz (10x220) - 1.75vCore
CoolerMaster Aero 7 Lite - 3,200rpm
ABIT NF7-S v2.0 (BIOS d20)
512MB Dual TwiSTER PC3500 @ DDR440 1:1 (2.0,3,3,9 - 2.7v)
Sapphire Atlantis 9800 - 3.3ns Samsung (325/290 Default)
WD-SE 240GB (2x120GB) SATA RAID-0 (NTFS - 16k Stripe)
Antec SX630II Mini-Tower Case Inc 300w PSU
2 x CoolerMaster 80mm Blue Neon Fans
WinXP PRO inc. SP1
nVidia Unified v3.13
Cat 3.7 - DX9.0b
 
You'll likely find that the drive temperature is fine just with
the drives mounted in 3.5" to 5.25" drive trays without fans.

You can always add a decent fan to that later if you need to.
Click to expand...


Hi,
out of interest Rod, how much personal data do you have? and what *system*
do you have in place to prevent data loss?
 
Wayne Youngman said:
Hi,
well I would be using the RAID-1 *only* as a data drive, that is the place I
keep all my personal stuff I collected over the years (pictures, docs,
MP3's, DivX etc). In all those years I haven't suffered any data loss, but
I have had a few friends whose drives have just *died*, like the motor has
gone or something heavy!. So it could be said that I have been *lucky*.
Well I don't wanna rely on luck anymore, so I figured RAID-1 would be a nice
easy system that would protect my data from a *Mechanical Drive Failure*,
that's the thing that scares me most about Hard-Disks, not viruses, or
Windows getting stuffed.

Your suggestion is still valid, that is having a removable Hard disk that
could be connected once a week to make backups, but I could still do that on
top of having Raid-1.

So to sum up my main fear is something *physically* failing on my drives,
Click to expand...

You should really cover the other real possibilitys tho,
like the house burning down, the place getting looted
by some druggy, even just the power supply dying
spectacularly and frying both drives at the same time.

It isnt even that expensive to protect against those with
DVD burners quite reasonably priced with stuff like yours
that doesnt change a lot over time. Just a bit of effort to
copy everything in duplicate to DVDs initially, keeping
one set of copys offsite, and ocassionally writing a
new pair of DVDs with just the newest stuff.
therefore RAID-1 has a strong appeal to me. . .
hope that makes my thoughts clear
Click to expand...

Yes, but you really should give more
thought to those other risks as well.
 
Wayne Youngman said:
Rod Speed wrote
Click to expand...
out of interest Rod, how much personal data do you have?
Click to expand...

Depends on what you mean, whether you mean the stuff
that is completely irreplaceable because I created it, or
whether you mean stuff that is likely to be very difficult
or labor intensive to replace like stuff thats been saved
from the web over quite a few years now. Some of the
later stuff isnt available anymore from the web.
and what *system* do you have in place to prevent data loss?
Click to expand...

I do that at a variety of levels.

All PCs have full image backups, normally to other PCs on the lan.
I basically buy bigger drives than I need for all PCs so the extra
space can be used for image files of other PCs on the lan. With
the PCs that dont change much over time, like the kitchen PC,
I basically just write a new image over the lan when anything is
changed, and I keep more than just the latest image too, so its
easy to step back if some change turns out to be undesirable.

With the completely irreplaceable stuff, normally stuff I have created
myself, that goes on multiple CDs and one set of copys are offsite.

With the stuff thats awkward or very time consuming to replace,
that stuff is on multiple PCs and is on CDs very occasionally,
say every year or 6 months. That frequency is adequate because
the most recent stuff would normally still be on the web and if the
worst came to the worst and the entire place was burnt to the
ground to completely looted by a druggy, the most recent stuff
could be obtained from the web again and the time involved would
be much compared with rebuilding the house, or buying a complete
set of new toys and configuring them, paid for by the insurance.

My insurance cover is basically 'new for old forever' which
means that I get to buy brand new toys to replace all the
toys looted or burnt, no matter how old they were and
doing that would take quite a bit of very enjoyable time |-)

Last time I went away for a few weeks I was a bit tempted
to put a sign on the front door saying "I'll be away for a couple
of weeks" in the hope that some druggy would strip the place
and I could buy a complete set of new toys. Wasnt game to put
the sign up tho, someone might mention it to the insurance assessor |-)
 
You should really cover the other real possibilitys tho,
like the house burning down, the place getting looted
by some druggy, even just the power supply dying
spectacularly and frying both drives at the same time.

It isnt even that expensive to protect against those with
DVD burners quite reasonably priced with stuff like yours
that doesnt change a lot over time. Just a bit of effort to
copy everything in duplicate to DVDs initially, keeping
one set of copys offsite, and ocassionally writing a
new pair of DVDs with just the newest stuff.


Yes, but you really should give more
thought to those other risks as well.


Wayne Youngman wrote


Depends on what you mean, whether you mean the stuff
that is completely irreplaceable because I created it, or
whether you mean stuff that is likely to be very difficult
or labor intensive to replace like stuff thats been saved
from the web over quite a few years now. Some of the
later stuff isnt available anymore from the web.


I do that at a variety of levels.

All PCs have full image backups, normally to other PCs on the lan.
I basically buy bigger drives than I need for all PCs so the extra
space can be used for image files of other PCs on the lan. With
the PCs that dont change much over time, like the kitchen PC,
I basically just write a new image over the lan when anything is
changed, and I keep more than just the latest image too, so its
easy to step back if some change turns out to be undesirable.

With the completely irreplaceable stuff, normally stuff I have created
myself, that goes on multiple CDs and one set of copys are offsite.

With the stuff thats awkward or very time consuming to replace,
that stuff is on multiple PCs and is on CDs very occasionally,
say every year or 6 months. That frequency is adequate because
the most recent stuff would normally still be on the web and if the
worst came to the worst and the entire place was burnt to the
ground to completely looted by a druggy, the most recent stuff
could be obtained from the web again and the time involved would
be much compared with rebuilding the house, or buying a complete
set of new toys and configuring them, paid for by the insurance.

My insurance cover is basically 'new for old forever' which
means that I get to buy brand new toys to replace all the
toys looted or burnt, no matter how old they were and
doing that would take quite a bit of very enjoyable time |-)

Last time I went away for a few weeks I was a bit tempted
to put a sign on the front door saying "I'll be away for a couple
of weeks" in the hope that some druggy would strip the place
and I could buy a complete set of new toys. Wasnt game to put
the sign up tho, someone might mention it to the insurance assessor |-)
Click to expand...


Hi Rod,
thanks for detailed reply. It's all certainly *food for thought* and I am
having lots of thoughts!. Even though I have been into I.T for several
years I have pretty much just used regular IDE/33 and ATA/66 drives. On my
newest build I got the chance to experiment a bit more with disk systems and
that was my 240GB SATA RAID-0 lol! total overkill for my windows install.

If I am to go ahead and buy a couple of IDE disks for my RAID-1 *Data* disk,
this set-up would be installed on my 2nd PC a PIII550MHz, so I will be
accessing my personal data via the network. I could probably map it to my
main machine and have it backing that up as well. . .cool didn't think of
that.

Now the *offsite* point is interesting, if a bit *paranoid*, but valid none
the less. So it would have to be 10-20 Burned DVDs or one big fat
*removable* disk that I could store somewhere. Hmm I smell a security
breach here, having all my personal and business data out of my site makes
me wonder. . lol I would have to find a safe deposit box or something.

Considering the DVD/External drive option, it does take some of the *lustre*
away from Raid-1, having said that I figure that if we get into
*probabilities*, there must be so much more chance of a hard disk failing,
than say my house burning down or some rabid maniac breaking into my home
and looting me!
 
Wayne Youngman said:
Hi Rod,
thanks for detailed reply. It's all certainly *food
for thought* and I am having lots of thoughts!.
Click to expand...

You want to be careful with those, they can end in tears before bedtime.

Be careful not to overdo it. You'll know you have overdone it
when you start to get brown smelly stuff dripping from your ears.

Unfortunately for you, by then its too late and the damage is irreversible.
Even though I have been into I.T for several years I have pretty much
just used regular IDE/33 and ATA/66 drives. On my newest build I got
the chance to experiment a bit more with disk systems and that was
my 240GB SATA RAID-0 lol! total overkill for my windows install.
Click to expand...
If I am to go ahead and buy a couple of IDE disks for my
RAID-1 *Data* disk, this set-up would be installed on my
2nd PC a PIII550MHz, so I will be accessing my personal data
via the network. I could probably map it to my main machine
and have it backing that up as well. . .cool didn't think of that.
Click to expand...
Now the *offsite* point is interesting, if a bit *paranoid*, but valid
none the less. So it would have to be 10-20 Burned DVDs or
one big fat *removable* disk that I could store somewhere.
Click to expand...

The removable disk is fine if you dont drop things much.

In your situation where the volume of new stuff isnt all
that high, its quite a bit easier to just take a new DVD
to wherever you keep the offsite backup when required.
Hmm I smell a security breach here, having all my personal
and business data out of my site makes me wonder. . lol I
would have to find a safe deposit box or something.
Click to expand...

Its completely trivial to encrypt it completely
surely so no one but you can ever access it.

Just be careful to not lose the key.
Considering the DVD/External drive option, it does take some
of the *lustre* away from Raid-1, having said that I figure that
if we get into *probabilities*, there must be so much more
chance of a hard disk failing, than say my house burning down
or some rabid maniac breaking into my home and looting me!
Click to expand...

Yep, no argument there.

But if you have your business data on those systems,
you really do need to have a proper offsite backup
for that stuff because you will likely go broke if say
the PCs are stolen or you have a decent fire etc.

The risk is quite small, but its greater than zero.
 
Having had a RAID-0 (mirror) SCSI system with removable bays, I found
that DataKeeper from the Partition Magic people is far more cost
effective. It monitors the directory tree that I have selected and
copies each file to a backup drive every time it is saved on the
original drive. That gives me a backup copy that I can restore
(actually as many as I want by date) in a short amount of time.
Recovery is not as fast as a mirror drive, but on the other hand, I
have the last 10 or so versions of each file so I can fix my own
screwups. Just run the backup directory to CD or DVD occasionally and
store it off site (how occasionally depends on the mean time between
fires at your house). I also have a media fire safe (about 3 or 4
times as expensive as a paper fire safe) to store onsite critical
media.
 
Wayne said:
Hi,

I want to set-up a nice disk system that is protected from data loss. My
friend just gave me his old PROMISE Fast-Trax100 card (IDE RAID PCI card)
which I have installed into my older machine. So I have been researching
the prices on 80/120/160GB drives.

The case I will be fitting the new drives too doesn't have enough space for
many drives inside so I am considering buying two *cooling* bay caddies that
fit into the CD-ROM bays.

What do you think of these:

COOLERMASTER *Cooldrive3* (cost less than £20-00 Inc vat)
http://tinyurl.com/3b73o

So I would have two of these, each holding a IDE drive configured in RAID-1.
To me that sounds like a pretty good investment, but perhaps a bit OTT?
Click to expand...

Data integrity on WinWhatever is still an oxymoron, even though NTFS
beats FATxx by a bunch.

The causes of lost/corrupted files are, IMHO in order of probability,
these: (1) fumble-fingers, (2) bad software and bad management of
software, (3) environmental problems (temp/humidity and power line
glitches, and (4) hardware. Given my ordered list, it seems rather
silly to spend tons of money to guard against (4) and one part of (3)
unless you have already taken serious measures about the other causes.
 
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