[ILUG] Why RAID

[Bryan O'Donoghue]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 July 2004 13:33, Paul Jakma wrote:
> 
> 
>>>The chances of a total disk failure  are negligible in my experience
>>>(especially with SCSI disks).
>>
>>Your experience is lacking then. :)
> 
> 
> Well, it;s quite lengthy, at any rate.
> 
> I've been running computers at home for about 20 years,
> and in that time I have never had a total hard disk failure,
> by which I mean a hard disk failure without warning
> in which it was impossible to recover the data (or 99% of it).


I think that, you need be a company or organisation with critical data that 
needs to be data redundant.

You could for example have four or five years of legally owned mp3, ogg and avi 
files floating around a hard disk and for the cost of 2xsome randomly cheap 
disk with storage capacity, you're pretty much guaranteed not to have the 
potential to loose that 1% of data.

Even with some good reasonably expensive hardware RAID, you can just get 
unlucky... after paying 20, 30 grand for redundant storage... and having seen 
reasonably expensive redundant data storage 'raid' arrays al-la promise, be 
reduced to ... or rather exposed as ... great big steaming piles of junk, my 
investment in 2xcheapo 80 gig software raid solution, even looks at bit... risky.
-- 
Bryan O'Donoghue
Embedded Software Engineer

Europlex Technologies Ltd
Clonshaugh Business & Technology Park
Dublin 17
Ireland

T:+353 (0) 1 2500500
F:+353 (0) 1 2500590
E:bryano at euoplex.ie
W:www.europlex.ie