I keep hearing from people in tech communities that keeping things in RAID is somehow better than just slapping it on a hard drive backup, but… why? What even is RAID storage and why is it better?
I spent last night looking up RAID servers on Amazon to get me an answer but I left with more questions: Do all the hard drives in RAID need to be the same size? My entire family switched their laptops due to the work from home orders, so I have a bunch of unused SSDs and HDDs lying around the house, can I just throw those in a RAID server and have it work?
Can I install an operating system on a RAID server? Would it run faster/slower? If I have a MacBook and can install Windows on my RAID server, would it work a bit like bootcamp? What happens when I’m not connected to it?
I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!
EDIT: I think I get it now: It’s a system that’s automatically backing itself up to… itself essentially. You do this by creating redundancies within the RAID system (multiple SSDs). If that’s not it, please tell me.
So final question: can I use a RAID server NOT in RAID? As in can I put multiple hard drives in a server, then plug the server in to my Mac and have it appear as several individual drives? Almost like a HDD mounting system on steroids.
In: Technology
Best I can tell for a simple answer, a RAID is having multiple drives doing the job of a single drive
1tb of portable storage holds roughly 1tb of files and if it fails then you lose that data
4tb of RAID storage might still only hold 1tb of files and would appear as a 1tb drive when you plugged it in, but it holds bits of each of that data on all of them. Should one of the drives fail, you just remove it, replace it with a new drive, and the remaining 3 drives would immediately copy to it the data you lost. Similarly anything you save to the drive is stored on all of them.
The advantage of having them connected this way, seems to just be ease of use. It’s more expensive, but you are less likely to have to think about backing up. The general rule is that you still should though – have the machine creating the data, a backup of that data stored locally, and a further backup stored in a different physical location for files that matter
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