RAID: Not Such a Clever Idea for Your Home PC - RAID 1 - Give up the ghost?
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The other ubiquitous RAID is the mirrored array offering redundancy and the safety of an up-to-the-minute backup drive to take over seamlessly in the event of a drive failure. So the "R" in RAID does justify its presence in a RAID 1 array.
Does RAID 1 do what it says on the tin?. Yes, it does. It protects from one of the limitations in the RAID 0 array -- hard disk failure. Just to be petty we'll elaborate: It protects from one hard disk failing.
There is one other issue with RAID 1, and we'll go so far as to say it's a risk. RAID 1 users are less likely to take regular backups or ghosts/images of their system. A certain complacency seems to set in when there's the perceived security of a mirrored drive. There's the assumption that, come what may, a backup exists. Except, of course, that it is not a backup.
The same feature that provides the protection can also be the user's downfall. RAID 1 maintains a faithful copy on the second disk of everything that's on the first. Warts and all. Mistakes made, files irrecoverably deleted, virus caused issues, shredding etc are all duplicated on the second disk. Users tend to forget that RAID 1 does not protect against errors, it protects only against one disk going faulty.
There are other instances where the RAID 1 insurance can provide very little protection, including in disasters caused by fire, theft or vandalism. RAID 1 is no substitute for regular backups. Even better, don't give up the ghosting till you have proper disaster recovery planning in place.
Remember the other risks referred to in the discussion of RAID 0? Most of those risks do also apply to RAID 1, and they are covered in the next section.
Next: Risky Array of Independent Disks >>
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