Why Excel Computers recommends RAID 1 Mirror for all the computers we sell

In this day and age of computers and essentially having your life put on them , it still surprises me how not seriously people take idea that you should always backup your data.  More often than not, someone will bring in a computer where their hard drive has either failed or they somehow been the victim of a massive virus infection worried about their files.  Fortunately for our customers, our many years of computer service experience allow us to be successful in recovering their data a good percentage of the time.  However, sometimes there just isn't anything we can do under certain circumstances and the customer has permanently lost their precious data.  The lesson here that we always try to tell people is to backup their data.  Even with that said, the reality is that sometimes people either procrastinate or are possibly intimidated with the task of backing up their data.

It is because of that reality that we often recommend having a RAID 1 Mirror configuration in the computer systems we build and sell.  What is RAID you ask?  RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives.  What does it do you ask?  A more text book answer to both questions is this:  A RAID is a series of hard drives treated as one big drive. These drives can read and write data at the same time, known as striping. The RAID controller determines which drive gets which chunk of data. While that drive writes the data, the controller sends data to or reads it from another drive. RAID also improves fault tolerance through mirroring and parity. Mirroring makes an exact duplicate of one drive's data on a second hard drive. Parity uses a minimum of three hard drives, and data is written sequentially to each drive, except the last one. The last drive stores a number that represents the sum of the data on the other drives.

More specifically to what we recommend and configure is a RAID 1 Mirror Array:

For Highest performance, the controller must be able to perform two concurrent separate Reads per mirrored pair or two duplicate Writes per mirrored pair.  RAID Level 1 requires a minimum of 2 drives to implement 

Characteristics & Advantages:

- One Write or two Reads possible per mirrored pair
- Twice the Read transaction rate of single disks, same Write transaction rate as single disks
- 100% redundancy of data means no rebuild is necessary in case of a disk failure, just a copy to the replacement disk
- Transfer rate per block is equal to that of a single disk
- Under certain circumstances, RAID 1 can sustain multiple simultaneous drive failures
- Simplest RAID storage subsystem design

So basically with a RAID 1 Mirror Array that we configure in our computer systems, you have 2 drives acting as one.  The same data is written to each drive at the same time, so essentially you have a real time backup.  If one drive happens to fail, then you will still have all of your data intact in the other.  From that point, you simply replace the defective hard drive with a new one and the array will "rebuild" or duplicate itself and continue functioning with redundant data security.  Of course the one drawback to this is if say you get a virus/spyware infection, then both drives will be infected.  That is to be expected with this kind of data security setup. RAID 1 Mirror is however, very effective in the event a drive actually goes bad and that's when you'll be thankful you have it

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