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Old February 28th 18, 03:32 AM posted to rec.photo.digital,alt.windows7.general
Paul[_10_]
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Default A simple way to transfer photos from your phone to Windows withoutinstalling anything on either

ultred ragnusen wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:

"Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea"
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles?&id=29


Yikes. I only googled and saw that there were a bunch of decisions to be
made.

May I presume to ask if "any" RAID method is useful in the home
environment, where all you really care about is safety of your data?

In my case, I don't even need one Terabyte disk, but now I have two.

My other option is to make one disk a Linux disk and the other a Windows
disk, where I can skip the whole GRUB mess since the HP Pavilion will boot
off of any disk you tell it to at startup.


This is like asking whether it's a good idea to
keep alligators in an aquarium tank.

No, it's not a good idea.

Yes, with planning, and practice in terms of what
to do if things go wrong, you could do it. People
keep snakes at home. At least, until in one case,
a rather large snake got loose and suffocated two
kids by strangulation in an adjacent apartment.

If you're going to use RAID, you practice on an
empty array, you practice "fire drills". What to
do if it says "degraded". What to do if it says
"failed", because the SATA connectors fell off.
(In some cases, you can recover from that.) Most
people who use RAID without reading the manual,
they usually get a "scary shock" some day, and the
people out there who panic easily, they're not
candidates for RAID.

You should back up your RAID, to an external disk.
Just like you would with a single drive. Now,
how much benefit does RAID provide, if you still
have to make backups ? Some people have the funny
idea that a RAID1 mirror is a backup. When it isn't.

As long as you understand *why* you've selected
a particular RAID config, you're going to be fine.
If you want to construct a huge RAID0 scratch
array, for some weird "raw" video format, that's
perfectly fine. Since you know it's a scratch disk,
if it dies, you only lose todays edits. Your
archival movie content is on another, larger backup drive.

There are also people, who run 16TB arrays full of
ripped movie content, and with *no backups*. They
can't afford backup drives. They could only
afford the drives for the array. And that's their
decision. They realize if the array fails, they're
going to have to rip from source DVDs all over again,
which could involve a lot of hours of work. As long
as they know this will (eventually) happen, why not
let them use RAID ? All it would take, is one power
supply failure (overvolting) to burn the entire array.
You can explain it to them, and they absorb the info
and accept the risk.

Paul