"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bc3c7b$1@news.povray.org...
> 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.

Hardware RAID on a desktop machine? Hardware raid controllers are 
exceedingly expensive. Are you sure it wasn't RAID implemented in the 
firmware/drivers?
That's far more common on desktop-type machines. It's what I've got in my 
'server'

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Invisible wrote:
>>>> I mean, *now* I have multiple seperate physical HDs so it's kind of 
>>>> unavoidable having seperate logical volumes. 
>>>
>>> No, it isn't. With RAID you can combine several HDs to one logical 
>>> volume, which even can hold if one of the disks break down.
>>
>> Or just mount the separate volume as a subdirectory of the system 
>> volume. :-)
> 
> Does Windoze let you do that yet?

Windows has let you do that for roughly ... since before Windows.

> Heh. If only that were actually true...

It does seem to have a little bit of trouble "sticking" in my 
experience. Not sure why. But it's supposed to work, certainly.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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>> 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.
> 
> Hardware RAID on a desktop machine? Hardware raid controllers are 
> exceedingly expensive. Are you sure it wasn't RAID implemented in the 
> firmware/drivers?
> That's far more common on desktop-type machines. It's what I've got in 
> my 'server'

Didn't require any special drivers for the OS - it just looked like a 
regular IDE device. But could quite well be something to do with the 


You'll be unsurprised to hear that he quickly threw it away...

I understand that Linux can do software RAID if you have the right 
kernel. Some versions of Windows can too - but IIRC not the desktop 
editions? It's not something I've ever really looked at. For me, RAID is 
something you only need on mission-critical servers, not desktop 
machines and certainly not home PCs. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Resilvering the mirror was similar. It's mirrored at the hardware level, 
> so the disks must be block-by-block identical.

That's the killer. At least the Windows software RAID-1 only copies the 
used blocks.

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

You're gaining a disk that's nowhere near the machine when the rain 
comes in the roof and floods your office. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bc3cbc$1@news.povray.org...
>>> Does anybody actually use RAID on a home system?
>>>
>>
>> Yup. My 'server' has four 160 GB sata drives in a RAID 5 config. Since 
>> it's also my first stage backup location, I wanted redundancy. Just wish 
>> I'd bought larger drives.
>
> Heh. And I thought *I* was crazy for owning just _one_ 160 GB drive in a 
> home PC...
>
> What on earth do you use it for?

Videos
Music
Podcasts
Webcasts
Documents (including large pdfs)
Installation files
Client DB performance data and documents
Backups of data on desktop and laptop
Virtual machine hard drives

It also runs the following:
Active Directory
DNS
SQL Server 2005
Oracle 9i (currently shut down)
Windows Sharepoint (pending reinstallation)
In addition, I'm trying to set up a media service so that the XBox can 
stream video and audio from the server.

It's got 480 GB of drive space on the RAID array and it's over half used. 
I'll upgrade the drive space sometime, but it's not going to be a simple 
operation

My desktop has one 320 GB, one 160 GB and one 80 GB drives.

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>> Resilvering the mirror was similar. It's mirrored at the hardware 
>> level, so the disks must be block-by-block identical.
> 
> That's the killer. At least the Windows software RAID-1 only copies the 
> used blocks.

Indeed. Probably makes it much faster...

Personally, I've never really trusted software RAID. I always prefer a 
hardware solution. (But, obviously, those are very expensive. The ones 
that work properly, that is...)

>> Yeah, I guess... Doesn't seem like you're gaining a huge amount, but I 
>> guess it's better than nothing.
> 
> You're gaining a disk that's nowhere near the machine when the rain 
> comes in the roof and floods your office. :-)

If *my* office ever _floods_... Well, let's just say I have way bigger 
problems than some binary data on a computer. ;-)

(My house is at the top of a hill, and my office is on the 2nd floor.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> What on earth do you use it for?
> 
> Videos
> Music
> Podcasts
> Webcasts
> Documents (including large pdfs)
> Installation files
> Client DB performance data and documents
> Backups of data on desktop and laptop
> Virtual machine hard drives

...OK, well VM drive images is going to eat that up pretty fast. ;-)

(I have a server at work that's rather full with Ghost images.)

Podcasts and webcasts are (AFAIK) designed to be small so they download 
fast.

> Windows Sharepoint (pending reinstallation)

OOC, what does that actually *do*?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull>
Newsgroups: povray.off-topic
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2008 9:35 PM
Subject: Re: Data recovery


> If *my* office ever _floods_... Well, let's just say I have way bigger 
> problems than some binary data on a computer. ;-)

Two words - roof leak

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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bc446f$1@news.povray.org...

> ...OK, well VM drive images is going to eat that up pretty fast. ;-)

The VMs aren't too bad. I don't have too many and I use a differencing drive 
method of creating them The os and common apps only exists in one virtual 
drive, but can be used by multiple VMs. When I install something into one of 
the VMs, all that gets stored is the differences from the base image.

> Podcasts and webcasts are (AFAIK) designed to be small so they download 
> fast.

I've got everything from 10 min interviews up to 2 hour conference sessions. 
Got a couple of GB in total. More on DVD.

>> Windows Sharepoint (pending reinstallation)
>
> OOC, what does that actually *do*?

It's a glorified web portal with a million addons. There's a lot of demand 
for it at the moment in SA, so it's mainly there so I can get some feel for 
how it works.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb684453.aspx

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Invisible wrote:

> Hildur K. wrote:
> 
>> Early on (after my first HD crash which
>> wasn´t a physical crash, only a partial wipe out)I went into the habit of
>> dividing my hard drives into partitions. Both my PC´s now have 4
>> partitions, each on a single physical drive, which means I use the
>> primary partition (C) for the OS, drivers and programs, and the other
>> partitions (D,E,F) for all work and data (NEVER saving to "MyDocuments"
>> or "Desktop"). The hard drives are much more reliable nowadays so I´m not
>> so worried about data loss.
>> 
>> In the (very likely) case my OS eventually crashes, I can reinstall or
>> upgrade without touching the other partitions so there is no loss of
>> data.
> 
> I do this.
> 
> I mean, *now* I have multiple seperate physical HDs so it's kind of
> unavoidable having seperate logical volumes. But I did it back when I
> only had one drive too. Makes reinstalling the OS that much easier
> without losing work. (If anything on my PC could be considered "work".)
> 
> I also have a big folder containing the installers for every program
> I've ever downloaded, so I can reinstall them all quickly without having
> to redownload them. (OTOH, I typically end up downloading a newer
> version anyway, so I'm not sure who I'm kidding...)

When I installed Linux (Ubuntu), I didn't separate /home into a second
partition. Stupid me. Now I want to switch distro, and I know it won't be
such an easy task...

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