Re: file systems

Dave Hall writes:
> On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 12:21:36PM -0600, Dylan Griffiths wrote:
> > Kurtis Peterson wrote:
> > >No RAID because the drives are different sizes ... main drive is 160GB
> > >... 2nd is 80GB ... 3rd is 60GB :) ... to be honest the reason the
> >
> > Well, a 300gb drive is something like 130$ -- and 180$ will get you a
> > 400gb one. I'd recommend you get a 400gb drive, move all your data to
> > one drive, and throw the rest out (I use old drives for testing purposes
> > -- but I buy matched sets of drives since I've run RAID for years).
>
> I do RAID where I need high availability (eg .9999 uptime). For a typical
> home system, I don't think RAID buys much since it is not a substitute for
> backups.

It buys much when a drive dies late on a Sunday night and you've got stuff
you're wanting to work on for Monday morning :) No, it's not a
substitute for backups, but it's really nice to not have to wait till
the next day to go buy a big disk cause all the little ones you have
arn't big enough to restore your data to :) That, and who wants to
spend hours recovering from backups? :)

> I'd recommend putting whatever you want in the box and buying a big drive
> and external enclosure (perhaps a couple) to do backups. You can
> disconnect the external drive from the computer and wall power to reduce
> the risk of primary and backup drives failing at the same time. Not as
> good as off-site backups but better than RAID or a slave drive to protect
> against data loss.

Buy a pair of 320GB's, RAID'em, and sleep happily. For additional
happieness, buy them from different suppliers (or make sure they come
from different batches) so you you don't have grief with "all disks
from this particular batch go bad at the same time" problems...

Later...

Greg Oster
Received on Tue Aug 8 13:29:21 2006