Secure Data with Simple Disk Mirroring

By Andy McDonough

September 16, 2006

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I'll bet you have at least one or two SMB clients who constantly worry about losing their data. It's natural for them to worry, because data is the backbone of many businesses. Fortunately, today's high-capacity, network-accessible add-on drives for centralized storage with Ethernet connectivity make automating backups is an effective solution and a lucrative add-on. Even better, they're a breeze to set up.

In this article, I'll show you how to add an extra layer of protection to your client's data using RAID 1 (also known as "disk mirroring") on a slick new network add-on box from Maxtor that offers dual 500-MB hard drives, and a fast 1-Gigabit Ethernet network interface that's ideal for the job.

As noted, we all have clients who wring their hands about potential data loss. Sales types, for example, may fret over the possibility of losing data on their largest accounts. Office managers and sys admins are concerned about losing company data. Truth is, they may indeed have a good reason to worry, even if they use automated backups.

As convenient and reliable as desktop or add-on drives are for backups, they are still of the same design as the mechanical devices you are trying to protect. All magnetic drives are subject to the laws of physics that lead to disk failures. That's the reality: Any magnetic drive, by its nature, is subject to failure. More precisely, every disk will fail at some point. The question is when.

For this reason, businesses with critical data should do more to protect their data. They may require RAID 1 protection, which essentially "mirrors" all their data to a second disk as a second layer of protection. By mirroring data, RAID 1 continues to make all data available immediately after a failure, so critical applications can continue to run. If you or your client's business can't interrupt business to restore missing data from backups, RAID 1 is the answer.

Until now, adding RAID 1 meant dedicating and configuring a PC with a drive array. But times are changing.

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