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first of all, does anyone even do this anymore? secondly, does my thought process make sense?

im thinking it would be as easy as just getting 2 large hard disks and putting them on the same sata cable. then I could load my windows off the M2 drive and keep any large files stored onto the hard drive that would be written to both discs redundantly. if one failed I could swap it out and replace it with the same hard disk type.

I don't know if raid is configured in software or if there's a physical board to handle it but I could find that out with a quick net search. just wondering if this is like a good solution to not having a hard drive fail on me again.

edit:: glad I asked! these are all great answers. i will follow up on these and let you know what i wind up doing. thank you!!

first of all, does anyone even do this anymore? secondly, does my thought process make sense? im thinking it would be as easy as just getting 2 large hard disks and putting them on the same sata cable. then I could load my windows off the M2 drive and keep any large files stored onto the hard drive that would be written to both discs redundantly. if one failed I could swap it out and replace it with the same hard disk type. I don't know if raid is configured in software or if there's a physical board to handle it but I could find that out with a quick net search. just wondering if this is like a good solution to not having a hard drive fail on me again. edit:: glad I asked! these are all great answers. i will follow up on these and let you know what i wind up doing. thank you!!

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[–] • 1 pt

the kid in me wants RAID 10, RAID 1 (I believe, mirroring 2 disks) would be sufficient.

[–] • 1 pt

You shouldn't view a mirrored drive as a reliable backup, mirroring is generally for redundancy and maintaining uptime. Keeping a drive constantly mirrored puts it thru more read and write cycles than a backup would perform making it a less reliable backup but a fallback that doesn't give you downtime when a drive fails. What's the use case? I should have actually asked that to begin w/

[–] • 0 pt (edited )

basically I had an external 1TB that is 15 years old and it went on me.

i want something I don't have to think of. wondering if RAID 1 is the way to go, seeing is if one drive fails I have the other and can write another blank drive (i believe) with the same data. sorry i'm not of any sort of computer technical background, just a home use case.

no way I want to use the "cloud." but also do want my external dying on me again.

don't really care about backup persay, just not risking losing the data I have on hand again.

edit: people here mentioned rsync, i will look into that as well.

[–] • 1 pt

rsync will prob do everything you need. I'd look into just straight disk imaging/cloning tho as your backup. It lets you take incremental copies of your disk that can just be swapped instantly w/ the existing one like a mirrored drive but won't be constantly writing to and reading from it making your back up drive more reliable as it's been written to and read from less.