OT: Buying vs. building your own computer

[Thermodyne]

Atrocities said:
Buy cheap system - $300.00 then spend $400.00 to upgrade.

Hey, what is a RAID system? And if it is what I think it is, how do you connect extra HD to it?

First you need a raid controller, either onboard or as an add on card. Then you connect more than one drive to it. With two drives you can do a mirror which keeps duplicate data on each drive. Down side, you loose half of the space on the drives, 2-20’s give you 20gigs to use. Loose a drive, you keep all of the data.

Or

You can do a stripe set which will write data to each drive at the same time. Very fast, but loose a drive, loose your data. You also get to use all of the space on the drives.

Or

You can attach three or more drives and do a Raid five. Raid fives maximize disk space, 5-20 gigs give you 80gigs to use/ 3-20's would give you 40 to use. And loose a drive, keep your data.

For storage of high value data, you can do a windows raid. Add two drives, convert them to dynamic and then mirror them. Loose a drive keep your data, and you only get to use half the space. Also, this set up is not bootable.

If you run Windows 2K or 03 server, you can also do a windows Raid 5 with three or more disks.

If you are truly worried about your data, then you need to move up to SCSI drives. If SCSI is the Benz of drives, ATA would fall in somewhere around a Yugo. You can pick up NOS 160 SCSIs for about a dollar a gig and a controller card is less than fifty.


PS: Buy a cheap POS computer, then you own a cheap POS.

[Atrocities]

So a RAID system is really not worth the investment? Just do back ups onto CDRom or DVD and your ok. Thanks for the info guys.

[Suicide Junkie]

I happen to be on HardDrive #7 and #8 due to a bad power supply.

However, due to the ability to read FAT32 partitions in floppy-booting DOS, I have not lost much. It may have taken a couple hours of power cycling, and copying like mad for 60 seconds before the disk destabilized and went whirr-scrape-clunk, but it was done

Backups are very important and will save you a ton of hassle when murphy inevitably comes to visit.

[Thermodyne]

Raid is worth the money. It can save your data or give you speed, which ever you need. And SATA raids and drives are cheep these days.

[rdouglass]

Thermodyne said:

Also, this set up is not bootable.

Everything else you said is spot-on but this is not true. They are indeed bootable even if you're RAID'ing with Windows and not true Hardware RAID - I do it all the time; Win2K, Win2K3, you name it....

[Thermodyne]

rdouglass said:
Thermodyne said:

Everything else you said is spot-on but this is not true. They are indeed bootable even if you're RAID'ing with Windows and not true Hardware RAID - I do it all the time; Win2K, Win2K3, you name it....

Areed. With good hardware yes, but several popular desktop chipsets do not support it, and will corrupt the boot loader. So my answer in a forum such as this is that it is not bootable.