And how would using software for Raid be any more redundant?
And even if your motherboard dies, you still have the data on the drives. Thats the point of RAID.
Also, all the major companies that make use of raid use either a dedicated RAID controller, which by the way is slotted into the motherboard, or use external RAID setups.
Please think before you post.
I specifically said the onboard RAID controller, which can very much be a single point of failure.
If the motherboard were to fail then sure, you would still have your data - the problem is that you would have to find a motherboard with the same controller to access it. That might not be a problem with a relatively new setup, but if it happened a few years down the line then finding a compatible replacement might not be that easy, leaving you screwed.
Discrete RAID controllers are in another category and price range altogether, while the same applies to them I think you'll find that support will be significantly better.
both very correct answers ( i tend to agree with Khoisan rather).
Depending on the RAID level he wants to go with, but in most cases this involves striping - which basically divides the data across all the drives.
Once a controller fails, you are going to have many sleepless nights to fix it ( and believe me - for a personal home user, getting a recovery company to fix it is just not an option - very very pricey...
I tried both flavours - Hardware RAID controller and also Software RAID using windows server 2008 R2 if i remember correctly.
SW RAID gave plenty of issues ( mostly because it was slow - and thus i had multiple cases where i encountered a secondary failure while recovering from a first - bye bye data (luckily it was plenty of Linux distro's which can be obtained again...
HW RAID - well depends on the controller, but still have a risk of failing. bit faster than a SW RAID - but very very expensive - and thus if you have a failure down the line , you will probably have a mission to find a similar controller with the same firmware etc etc..
Thus after about 5 years i recently switched to a linux based solution called UNRAID.
It basically took away all the negatives from the above solutions - its a software based setup, but the data is not striped - eg immediately you have a major advantage. (Thus - in a 10 drive setup on HW RAID-5 (or SW for that matter), if 2 drives failed, you lose everything... - On UNRAID , you only lose at most 2 drives of data - 8 drives of data still intact - MAJOR WIN!.
Other major advantage is that UNRAID can be expanded using
any size drive you have lying around (other RAID setups tend to require you to have all drives sized exactly the same - and thus expanding it a few years down the line is a very very expensive and difficult problem) - I currently have it running with about 6 x 3TB's , 3 x 2TB's and a few 1.5 TB's i have lying around.
only drawback is that it is a dedicated OS - thus using the server for any other applications is a bit of a struggle ( although the UNRAID community has been very active in developing modules for downloading / media serving etc. They even have a VMWARE setup for the more courageous out there.)
Hope you manage to get your solution working.
PS
googling the windows 8 RAID solution - "storage spaces" doesn't provide any warm feelings yet... - if you really have to, windows 7 should be a better option (or a server version)
