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Periodically I find one of my old photos or other files has become 0Kb and lost. By the time I have found this the backup is the same. So I am considering using RAID 5 or perhaps RAID 1 to protection one NTFS partition. I have no prior experience with RAID software or hardware and would like some help getting started?

I can fit up to 4 HDDs and I use the larger HDs to have bootable Linux Debian or Lubuntu Window 7 or Windows 10 say. But I want to be sure that all operating systems will work with out one corrupting data but from what I read this may be difficult? Or I just don't understand if this is possible and a reasonable strategy?

I am planning to use an old Fujitsu server as my desktop with an old sound card. I mention that because the server can handle RAID 0 or 1 I do not have setup software for it and I do not expect it to be clever enough to just handle use of part of a HDD? So I have in mind to use software RAID.

The BIOS handles simple 3 primary +1 extended partitions. Would putting the raid partition first then the window boot partition then one Linux the windows and Linux-swap as extended partitions. There for each HDD would be bootable with grub and Linux but only some would also have Windows.

I also intend to use two of the SATA cables for rescuing and copying hard disks such as for my laptop occasionally. RAID must not interfere with doing that.

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    RAID is not backup.
    – ChanganAuto
    Commented Dec 30, 2021 at 11:19
  • So are you saying it will not save files becoming 0Kb due to ordinary way storage works around losing clusters. I am not otherwise planning to use RAID to backup I back up everything to one of a number of USB sticks once a month anyway but that is only to recover things that I have deleted or edited unintentionally or a computer failure.
    – Andrew Lohmann
    Commented Dec 30, 2021 at 11:29
  • If you already have backups then fine, that's what I was hinting of, nothing else. Now I must complement it with RAID isn't a solution for failing drives or any other condition causing file corruption.
    – ChanganAuto
    Commented Dec 30, 2021 at 11:34
  • I will wait to see what other people say. I used two dimensional parity checking to protect a 256 byte serial EEPROM, that is as big as you could get 30 years ago. If the instrument was turned off during a save this software would recover at least one byte and warn if two bytes were lost. It used 32 bytes. This was what I was hoping for but on a bigger scale. I am not talking about using HDDs that are in a poor state but using HDDs that are good or excellent but of cause will in the normal way of running loose data and replace clusters as a part of SMART.
    – Andrew Lohmann
    Commented Dec 30, 2021 at 11:48

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I have abandoned that idea of using RAID. That is I just have three HDDs in this server which I use as a desktop. Therefore I simply zip up directories to one or of the 2nd or third disk and a USB sticks for backing up.

The problem therefore is I can not discover files that have become corrupted lost and are 0 bytes. I loose any good version of those broken files when I delete the oldest back up.

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