Ron,
Its an interesting question.
The point of RAID is for an easier and quicker recovery from disk failure.
With a proper hardware RAID card, I don't see you would have a problem. When
a drive fails you just swap it out.
An alternative and simpler solution is to use a Recovery partition on a
different drive. Altiris or Acronis do this. It is a really simple way of
getting some reassurance that you can recover quickly. The difference
between this and RAID is that you have a snapshot rather than real time
copy, so you will lose something; but conversely you can have multiple
differential snapshots. RAID will not help you roll back if you have a
software fault, whereas a Recovery solution will.
Hope that helps,
Anthony,
http://www.airdesk.com
"Ron O'Brien" <castcall@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uhzevFW8IHA.4988@xxxxxx
Quote:
>I was just about to install a larger C: drive on my PC which was configured
>as RAID0 (there are also two other HDD's for data/storage set as RAID1),
>then I read a thread from within this newsgroup in which Carey Frisch
>(Microsoft MVP) directed someone to read - Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible
>Idea http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles?&id=29 and that has made me
>re-think my plans.
>
> Is RAID really worth? it is a much more complex setup and a nightmare when
> things go wrong and, as the article points out, there is a 25 - 30% chance
> something will go wrong. Indeed my own experience of a previous PC with
> RAID1 showed that it was by no means an easy task to restore everything
> when one HDD did fail after just 4 months.
>
> So I'm left with a total of 4 HDD's and wondering if I should even
> consider RAID, OK so I do a bit of HD video editing and RAID0 'could'
> speed things up, but will I really notice that gain? I have equally
> undertaken HD video editing on a much less powerful non-RAID PC and
> managed OK.
>
> The one think that RAID1 'was' in my mind (and I would suggest in the mind
> of many others) always useful for was data protection (but with loads of
> hassle) so I'm thinking there must be a way whereby I can install all four
> drives so that only two are visible and the other two are a mirror image
> set so that at the end of the day, or maybe twice a day, some software
> would back up the main visible drives to the 'invisible' back-up drives.
> Thus if any drive failed, I could just switch connectors and re-boot.
>
> Now, is what I've said a pipe dream or can it happen, and if so what
> software and are there any obvious pitfalls - apart from the time to make
> the back-up at the end of each day?
>
>
> --
> Ron O'Brien
>