Updating the 'puter for hardcore ownage

[kandrathe]

I've been reading about RAID and decided against it for much the same reasons, and the fact that you have to hope that whatever takes out one drive doesn't also kill the other. RAID offers a level of redundancy, but shouldn't be used for true backup.

It can also add IO speed when you stripe data over multiple spindles. This is most important for data intensive applications, so not too much concern for gamers. This summer for my work we are implementing 6 iSCSI 16x1TB units in a raid 5 configuration for an application, and speed is a big factor, with reliability and recoverability being 2nd. We are mirroring entire enclosures using DFS, so we'll end up with about 45TB of storage which will never need backup.