Updating the 'puter for hardcore ownage

[--Pete]

Hi,

Some hard drives fail. It doesn't really matter the brand. If you get a failure, you're just unlucky.

Yep. And I doubt that the length of the warranty has much correlation with the drive failure rate. Especially since most failures are early onset or end of life (often assumed to fit a Weibull distribution).

Consumer level hard drives have a higher failure rate than business class drives, it's engineered in... or rather they don't go through the same series of reliability testing or have the same DPPM criteria.

"If you want prime oats, you've gotta pay the price. If you don't care that they've been through the horse, you can get them cheaper." :)

I don't really like built in raid for a few reasons:
1) they are software RAID systems, not a huge deal in the day and age where processor speed mostly doesn't matter, even for games.

Interesting. if you could, would you expand this or give a readable link or two. I guess I fell into the trap that all RAID was pretty much created equal. Since one of the things on my plate is building a server, and I was planing to incorporate RAID0+1 or RAID5, your implication that there are different RAID solutions with trade-offs between them is something I probably should check out.

2) Your points of failure to cause great complexity with retrieving data goes up by about a factor of *10*.

Consider that if your motherboard fails you need to replace it with the same board, or a board with the same onboard raid chip (do you ever see the RAID chip brand and model number on a motherboard box?).

Addressing your last question first, yes I do see those data on ASUS motherboard specs. I can't say specifically on the box, not having an ASUS box handy. More to the point, I think, is finding something with that chip set years after the original purchase.

If your CPU or motherboard fails after warrantee, you would normally use that as an excuse to upgrade, but if you're chained to getting your RAID back up and running in order to get your data off first, well, you lose that as an option.

Interesting. Again, I was under the impression that a RAID1 setup would normally be rebuild-able under any RAID controller since there is no striping involved.

3) Any "real life" benchmarks (like booting time, or loading a level of a game) show VERY small gains from running RAID0. My own experience with RAID 5 seems to be in line with that.

About all that is left *is* small gains. In the early '80s, improvements were of the 4X, 10X, and bigger jumps (consider going from the 4.bahbahbah MHz 8088 of the PC to the <strike>20</strike> 12MHz 80286 of the AT). Not even in graphics processing do we see such great improvements anymore.

In this day and age, my life revolves around digital information. I lose an un-backed-up hard drive, I lose my baby's pictures, important information about my dead grandmother and other thing the likes of which cannot possibly be replaced.

Exactly. Except for games, I don't generate that much data, but I do the weekly incremental, the monthly full, and for irreplaceable info, the archive to disk in a fireproof vault in the storage room. To me, that is the boundary between security and paranoia;)

--Pete