Re: Western Digital "MyBook" as RAID?

Joerg wrote:

No problem, although I am not quite the expert to set this stuff up.
However, it would have to run in the background like RAID. I could
imagine a backup to freeze on me when a file that is just being backed
up is accessed. For example a huge CAD file. That would happen all the
time here in the office, all day long. In fact, that is just the
problem. Right now I back up during lunch and after hours. Kind of a
pain because I have to come back and turn the machines off.

I haven't really followed this thread, but the thing that's called "software
RAID" does what you need, on physically different disks (at least in the
Linux world).

AFAIK "hardware RAID" doesn't just refer to physically separate disks but to
an array that appears to the outside, by virtue of a special hardware
controller, as a single disk. The advantage of HW RAID is that it takes the
load of controlling the disks off the main processor, or it can cleverly
interleave the files on the separate disks so that streaming access is much
faster (useful in video editing applications).

But if all you need is silent, transparent mirroring of files on two disks,
SW RAID is for you. If one disk fails, the other one takes over and gets
mirrored back as soon as you get a new disk.

In Linux, all this is built into the standard kernel so you won't notice
RAID at work except for a minor performance hit. I'm sure something similar
exists for Windows as an add-on but I don't know *** about Windows.

robert
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