"Mike Hough" <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> I have found that hard drives are not as reliable as they used to be.
> Several years ago I lost my main drive and hadn't made a backup for several
> months. It was the main reason I stopped doing graphics for several years.
> Since then I have always had several copies of my data and always have a
> RAID 1 setup. Hard drives are so big these days and relatively inexpensive
> there really is no reason not to. On paper the chance of losing both disks
> is 0.25%, although realistically it is probably a little higher. It has been
> a nice setup, since I have had drives fail over the years and have been able
> to just replace the drive and mirror without any major downtime or hassle. I
> make a point to keep any non-essentials like programs and the OS on a
> different disk since these are most likely to frag a disk(yes, I use
> Windows). I guess that sounds a little paranoid...

It's actually the first hard drive I ever lose (well, the first one that is a
total loss, instead of just being mangled enough to start losing data and
wanting replacement), so you may be right. Maybe not too much of a surprise, as
the devices necessarily keep getting more and more delicate as the storage
density increases.

My wallet calls your approach paranoid indeed, but the security-aware computer
expert in me calls it wisdom... so far, it's just that my wallet has always had
the last say when it came to my personal stuff, righteously claiming that
"nothing has ever happened so far". So with that Linux machine mainboard having
five SATA channels, maybe it is time to go RAID.

My windows machine doesn't allow an easy transition to RAID, however. It does
have some BIOS support for RAID, but with only two SATA channels - and both of
them already in use (and the IDE channels just as well) - that might be a
daring quest in itself.

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