Member Avatar for fungurudel

I am very new to dedicated servers and just found out that it is good to have a mirror even if you have a backup drive as mirror is completely different from backup... is it 100% recommended to have a RAID on the server or can one do without it?

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Whether to deploy RAID depends on tolerance for downtime and the kind of failure being guarded against. For a production server that must stay available, some form of disk redundancy (mirror or other RAID level) is strongly recommended; for a disposable test box or a machine that can be rebuilt quickly from image backups, a single drive plus a solid backup-and-restore plan can be enough. correctly highlights the redundancy benefit; ’s point about “quick recovery after a hack” is misleading — a mirror will reproduce a compromised or deleted state unless backups/snapshots exist.

Practical choices: a two‑disk mirror (RAID1) is the simplest path to immediate failover. For larger arrays, RAID10 gives a good mix of performance and fault tolerance; RAID6 tolerates two simultaneous disk failures and is preferred over RAID5 on modern large drives because rebuilds take long and increase the chance of a second failure. Consider ZFS or filesystems with checksumming/scrubbing for protection against silent data corruption.

Operational best practices complement RAID: maintain off‑site, versioned backups and regularly test restores; enable SMART monitoring and automated alerts; keep a compatible spare or hot spare; use a UPS to avoid mid‑write power loss; and for databases, prefer replication/cluster approaches in addition to disk redundancy.

Quick admin checklist (Linux software RAID example):

# check array status
cat /proc/mdstat

# detailed info
mdadm --detail /dev/md0

# example rebuild sequence (adjust device names)
mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --fail /dev/sda1
mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sda1
mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdb1

Caution: commands must use the correct device names; mistakes can cause permanent data loss. In short: RAID reduces downtime from drive failure but never replaces a well‑designed backup strategy.

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Member Avatar for rch1231

Hello,

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is used to either speed up access to the data or prevent loss of data if one of your hard drives fails. RAID 1 is mirroring where one or more disks are mirrored to another set of identical disks. If you set up two disks in a RAID 1 configuration and one of the dries fails the other drive takes over as the primary and you replace the defective drive and the system automatically re-mirrors the new drive. Look at this web sie for a better description:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Member Avatar for cybasic

You need to have the Mirror RAID. It's really useful when server gets hacked and all the files are lost. You can recover real quick with it.

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