>> Does anybody actually use RAID on a home system?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> That's RAID-5 -array, so it can handle a break-up on any of those disks.
> 
> These are RAID-1:
> And so are these:

Is that software RAID or hardware RAID?

My dad went with a hardware RAID solution, and it was utterly useless. 
You had to resilver it every few hours because it kept breaking.

>> and wait many, many hours for that to complete. And then it would work 
>> for another few hours before failing one of the drives again.
> 
> Freaking slow, if RAID-1 takes many, many hours. That 2-terabyte array 
> took some hours and it's RAID-5, so the computer had to calculate all 
> the data. RAID-1 is "only" reading and writing and it's much faster.

Ever tried to perform a low-level format on a HD? No matter what size it 
is, it always takes an extremely long time. (The bigger the drive, the 
faster it is, but the power to weight ratio seems fairly constant, so it 
always takes a long time.) Formatting a huge drive with, say, FAT or 
NTFS only takes a few minutes, but a low-level format takes an hour or more.

Resilvering the mirror was similar. It's mirrored at the hardware level, 
so the disks must be block-by-block identical.

>>> Yep, that's true and very reasonable. You should also RAID the 
>>> work-partition and take scheduled backups ;).
>>
>> Backup onto *what*?
> 
> Ie. on external HD?

Yeah, I guess... Doesn't seem like you're gaining a huge amount, but I 
guess it's better than nothing.

>> I have, like, 100 GB of data now. I'm not aware of anything large 
>> enough to hold that other than another HD. (Or an LTO tape...)
> 
> Surf man, surf.

...in other words, a HD. Like what I said. :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
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