IntelX25-M 80gb OR RAID0 500gb 5yr warrantees?

[dez93]

Hi all. I'm going through diagnosis on my PC after it died due to mirror raid falling down in stages. I was initially attracted to the RAID mirror idea because people talked about replacing drives with the kind of nonchalant, laissez-faire attitude one might expect from a lottery winner deciding to pitch away their old shoes. If you're considering dipping into RAID and you're not an IT superhero: THIS ISN'T TRUE.
So, without going into the massive pain-in-the-arse i'm currently enduring, my future options seem to be thus:

1. replace the dead drive, if it's just one, with an identical drive. Backup regularly, but live with the feeling that my system uptime is about as secure as a rich blind pensioner stumbling through a slum shouting "i hate poor people".
2. replace the dead drive with an Intel X25-M 80gb. Very expensive, but well warranteed and will (hopefully) warn me as it begins to die. Use the remaining drive as storage.
3. replace the dead drive with a RAID0 set of 2 drives with 5 year warrantees. Schedule backups every evening. Or maybe every ten minutes, just to be sure.

Bite the bullet now and go solid state? Limp on with 1 drive and superregular backups until the street price of the X25-M 80/160 drops to sensible levels? Simply cut my losses and back up all my data in binary on a notebook, in pencil, every night? Give up computing and live on a desert island, catching fish with a pointy stick like Tom Hanks in Cast Away?

 

[taltamir]

honestly, what is the problem? drive failed, just replace it... raid1 is easy and safe even if you are NOT an IT superhero.
don't do raid0, and the drive warranty is irrelevant.

ps. raid0 is NOT a mirror... raid0 is striping.. raid1 is mirror... what exactly did you use and how did it fail?

 

[dez93]

ok, i guess i keep calling raid1 raid0.
problem was that the mirror degrade, asked if i wanted to rebuild it, i did, everything was fine. Should I have concluded one drive was now scrap, given that the mirror then worked fine for a few weeks? Maybe I should, but I looked and asked around and found no answer which convinced me that I could test both drives for faults individually and then remirror them. Like I say, since the drive/s were then working fine again I figured it was just a glitch. But then it happened again, I fixed it again and it was fine again. It's now up to 4 times; I assume there's a hardware fault on 1 drive but whatever the problem is has completely shut me out of my system like never before - I can't even boot to cdrom which I just don't understand. (http://forums.anandtech.com/me...d=32&threadid=2275668). SMART (ActiveSMART) never worked on the drives so I didn't have an early warning system, if that would have given me one. Basically I'm getting tired of expecting hard drives to fail and throw my worklife off track for days to weeks without warning, usually at the worst possible time. I've had 3 internal Western Digital drives die on me, and one external, despite taking all reasonable precautions (surge, elecrostatic, case temperature, mounting cages), now this RAIDs packed up and it was a ah heck to install in the first place - having to slipstream RAID drivers into the BIOS is NOT especially easy, nor was getting the drives recognised so I could install WinXP to them and boot from them (neither were impossible, but it certainly wasn't easy).
This is why I'm tempted to throw money at this solid state option, despite usually being a penny-pincher. One drive > 1 sata port = no controller confusion for the the system. Intelligent failure management and warning systems = no sudden loss of unbackedup data. Performance leap. Small capacity means being forced to use only for OS & programs, meaning any corruption or software conflicts won't endanger my data.
OTOH, if I thought I could have a RAID1 set which was SMART monitored, was easy to install and well recognised on the system, and was simple to diagnose for drive problems, with easy to replace individual drives, then I'd probably go RAID1 again. But unless there's some excellent 3rd party RAID1 controller software out there to address all my woes, I don't see why I should go down this route again....?

 

[dez93]

unrelatedly, i laughed my arse off at this chunk of one of your posts i just read:

"every single post indicates that you have no idea what you are talking about"

classic.