250Gb Raid 1 with Hotswap

[Koal.T]

heya everyone,

i'm building a new fileserver for my home, and have decided to go RAID.

at the moment, I am gathering parts, and havent decided on a motherboard yet, but have an Athlon XP 2400, 2x Maxtor 250Gb 7200rpm HDDs and a 30gb hdd, cdrw, a copy of xp pro oem and a case.

i want to setup the 250gb drives in a raid one mirror array, but then I thought, if the case blew up I'd loose data. I am not sure how I am going to do the array yet, I cant find a good priced raid controller (pci) in any uk online store yet that I think is good, so I might do a motherboard raid or software raid...

so, to overcome the backups problem, I am wondering if i can do this:
get a hdd swap bay and use it to swap another 250gb hdd if I get one into the system (hopefully hotswappable)
every night at say 1am if the hdd is present a program will copy the contents of one of the main drives to the backup 250gb in the hdd caddy. if its not there it doesnt do any copy obviously. then in the morning i can get the backup drive and take it out and take it like to work with me, then in the evening I swap in a second drive and it backups to that so it rotates the backup. this means I need 4 250gb hdds but I am not too worried about that yet.

is this feasible and how can it be improved or not? also how

thanks,
koal

[John Prophet]

What if you just get another machine to act as a backup machine?

With some advanced batch files you can probably set up just about any kind of backup scheme you want.

But look, Im a little worried about all those big drives, why dont you put them in the post to me and Ill hold 'em safely until you need them!

JP

[Koal.T]

hmm, another system hdd, proc, mb and memory, case, and cd drive though again plus another copy of xp - although perhaps linux with samba might run better :?

and also means no way to take them out of the house easily

koal

[John Prophet]

true, but I could build a system for the cost of 3 250s. lol.

[Koal.T]

if i did though, do you reccomend a software raid 1 (as xp will be on the 30gb) or a motherboard raid (reccomended mb?) as I cant find a good priced pci raid controller for a good price over in the uk right now...

[John Prophet]

These things are pretty interesting though I dont know much about them.