INPUTS FOR RAID CONFIGURATION WELCOME...

[lcravagnani]

Thanks for the help. I'll keep all of this in mind when setting it up. Just a sidenote for Tostada: With your computer expertise, where exactly would you put the i-Ram or whatever it is with all the other components I have on this PC? Also, I don't have to tell you how much I spent on all of this, but it wasn't even U$ 5000. It was not asinine because I made profit in all of my builds so far, and this is no different. I was only able to build this because I had some profit on my 2 previous builds. Instead of talking about my dream PC, I went out and built it. Alimoalem, I thought one of the purposes of this forums was to help members including on research. I did plenty of research before I put this toguether, specially taking into account all the problems I ran into my first 2 builds. I built my first PC because I did not have money to pay for a pre-built one, buying parts every month. To me, it's the only way you learn, ask the wise and try it yourself. No offense, but it seems to me that you and Tostada are a little envious... Go ahead and try to have several different partitions under Media Center and see for yourself if it works like it should... I bet you it's better to have 1 partition under Raid...

 

[hellokeith]

Originally posted by: batmanuelThat is backwards.

Negative. Perhaps you don't see the logic.

Originally posted by: batmanuelit is pretty easy to replace the OS and apps once you have a new drive (even easier if you use Norton Ghost to create a copy of the partition for safekeeping on the storage drives).

While it is true no RAID makes unnecessary good backups, imaging software like Ghost is not as reliable as many would claim, particularly for workstation-type PC's which have many software interdependencies and plug-n-play bios HAL connections to hardware. This type of information *can* be lost and not retrievable via re-imaging. Not to mention the SID issues you will have if your computer is in a domain and/or a server.

Originally posted by: batmanuelYour media (especially iTunes purchases) and personal files (tax returns, pictures, home movies) can't be so easily replaced, so you want to proctect them with mirrored backups. If you have your media/mass storage on in RAID-0, you are just asking to lose everything when a drive craps out.

2 drive mirroring of movies, tv shows, and music is a horrible waste of space. Better off burning to DVD or using a file server or SAN with RAID 5.

Originally posted by: batmanuelKeep in mind though that if you use the onboard RAID controllers, you could still lose all of your data even in RAID-1 if your board craps out and you can't get the same RAID controller on your next board. That's why a non-integrated RAID solution is usually better in the long run, because the card is usually portable between systems. Software RAID-1 is nice too, because it is also motherboard-independent (although it doesn't perform as well as the hardware solutions).

RAID cards can fail as well. I have never had a motherboard failure with the brand of boards I'm using. A RAID card is really only useful if you are doing RAID 5.


lcravagnani, you and your customer have no need for I-RAM.