Can (similar to) Raid be accomplished with backup

There is something called a RMB (removable bit) that i used to hack on USB sticks.  This made the drive appear in my computer as a hard disk rather than removeable media.  RMB is what flags the drive as removable.

One thing i notices when doing this is that the drive became available in the disk manager (manage my computer) and that you could include it in a RAID stipe set.  I did not do it because it did not seem very advisable but you could apply the same scenario to a external USB hard drive maybe.

if you can fool the PC in to thinking it is a fixed disk then there should be no reason you can not include it in a stripe set.

however a stripe set is 3 disks so i guess you would need a third disk in the setup - if you have 2 internal hard drives great otherwise you might need to get 2 externals.  I cant help with the specifics - joust pointing out that researching how to change the RMB on the removable disks should allow you to add them to a stripe set.

thinking about it more - forget it.  if you had one disk with low bandwidth like hanging off a usb combined with fixed disks that have local hard disk speed then the disks would all have to work at the lowest speed of the set.

im sure you would have the bad result of your system performance falling though the floor.  although a good experimental idea you will not gain benefit from it.  try it though and let me know what happens.

maybe if you had a screaming speed usb3 with all the bells and whistles it would keep up.

have 2 internal hard

Im sure that if a raid stripe set came across disks with such a speed difference you would freak out the PC - probably to BSOD  especially if you managed to fake the compatibility by telling the system the USB was actually a fixed disk.  I just very much doubt you can create disk redundancy with disks of different spec and speed.

You haven't mentioned  your operating system. In Windows 10, you can setup a mirrored volume:
http://www.windowscentral.com/how-set-mirrored-volume-file-redundancy-windows-10

RAID is predominatly used for AVAILIBILITY, not as a backup.

A mirror will be useless if you have a Malware attack encrypt data, or a power supply go "feral" and over volt the 12V line, or a heap of documents are accidentally deleted, or the building burns down, or if the computer is stolen.

For most users, there is only a small amount of data is of high importance. You can always reload your operating system and download movies again, but tax records, special photos and email are difficult to replace. Usually, a backup onto a USB key works well. It is possible to either manually copy data over, or write a simple script.

A pair of $10USB keys kept in your drawer at work, or at a friends house, or in a seperate shed is usally enough to cover nearly any problem.

neilpage99 Mirrored drives are not availible on all versions of Windows10. Pro has it, home does not.

Windows 10.
I will have backups. But what I want to accomplish is minimizing down time in case of a hard drive failure.
I would go with raid but since the two drives I have are not identical one in a ssd and the other is a sata raid is not recommended.

Professional

Malmensa - the point, in lieu of knowing the author's operating system, was to offer it as a possibility. Thanks for your insight.

SATA hard drives are not the issue have enough and the workstation accepts 4.

You mentioned Stripe. Stripe offers no fault tolerance so it will not help to what I want to accomplish.

When you said RAID and backup and in case a disk goes down i thought you meant RAID 5.  This works by creating a stripe set where one third of the space  ( if across 3 disks) becomes a parity information.  If you remove one disk then there is always one disk remaining with data and another with the parity information that allows the missing disk to be automatically re-constructed. While the disk is down at the cost of extra processing power the required information is constructed on the fly as an when needed.

Think of it like this

                        Disk 1        Disk 2        Disk 3
Stripe 1          Data          Data           Parity
Stripe 2          Data          Parity         Data
Stripe 3          Parity        Data           Data

as you can see - remove any of the 3 disks and what remains is a parity and a data.  from this the computer lives on without needing to reboot.  You replace the disk and the system regenerates it in the background over time.  This means the drives are "hot-swap" but they need to be mounted in a special caddy that allows them to re-connect to the system.  A USB allows for connection of a drive without rebooting so it should work.

However, as i pointed out if one drive in the set is a lower speed that the others and you have faked its properties to set up the RAID then you will have a big performance issue - even if it does work.

maybe the best solution is to have 3 identical external USB3 drives, flip the RMB of all 3 so the computer thinks they are fixed drives and then create a RAID5 stripe set across them.

In theory it works - i would be interested to know if anyone has managed to set this up though.

this is just a suggestion with an unknown outcome - please exercise your own due dillegence.

Does anyone else have a comment on this?  do any 'experts'  know if this will indeed work ?

oh, by the way - having 3 disks in parallel gives you a big speed increase as the workload is shared.  I have 3 internal fixed SSDs in my system set up like this and the performance is amazing !!

I have found on EE something looks close to accomlish this task its name is Casper™ 10 https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/
see https://www.experts-exchange.com/videos/210/Cloning-a-Hard-Drive-with-Casper.html he also wrote a article on this.
What do you think

That article is an excellent How-To for Casper, but it does not address the potential problem of having two identical internal drives, one original and one cloned, each with a bootable system partition. Anyone have experience with this?

I answered your question in the article comments.

I set up Casper on a internal hard drive mounted on a hard drive docking station. and as thy recommend a second drive for restore point backup also on a docking station. so it is available to slide in in case of hard drive failure hope will not disappoint when needed.

Abraham, I suggest that you test your Casper drive image by booting from the first drive in the docking station. That involves restarting your computer and pressing the appropriate key. See this webpage for your key BIOS access keys.

Once in the BIOS Setup, go to the Boot menu and change the Boot Order to make your first drive in the docking station the first one in the Boot order. See this webpage:  Change Change boot order.

Depending on your particular brand of computer, you may be able to press a different key during Windows Startup to allow a one-time choice of the drive to boot from. Check your manual.

This test may or may not work. Windows may not like booting from a docking station. If it does boot, your have a good disk image. If it doesn't boot, you may or may not have a good image. The best test would be to pull the first drive out of the docking station and swap it for the drive in the computer.

You are wise to have both backups: a full drive image that is bootable and also a drive image that allows incremental backups and can restore to another drive. With Casper, the bootable drive image can be updated fast, but it cannot preserve earlier incremental versions of your drive.

Also, thank you for accepting my earlier solution!