I love Striping Drives!!!
(so, answer to Greg's 1st Post is _YES!!!_)
Prior to this Machine, all others were IDE type Drives. Mirroring would require a Drive Controller on the Expansion Bus, along with SCSI Drives - which the costs were > 300% of a "Master / Slave" set of Two IDE Drives.
This was a very Jurassic approach! (manually updating data from the "Master" Drive to the "Slave" Drive), but it did keep a redundant copy of my data + Directories, so when the Drive with the MBRs did fail, data was still arranged per Sub Directory structure.
This dramatically reduced the time and tasks required to get the Machine back in operation, but had more risks than a fully functioning RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks / Drives).
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Funny - but sad story, per my current Machine...
The Motherboard on this Machine has (6) SATA Drive Controllers built in, and was shipped with a single SATA Fixed Disk ("Hard Drive"), and a SATA CD-RW/DVD-RW+/-.
About 1 year after receiving the Machine, I decided to initiate a RAID Approach - and to do so with a "Clean Slate". So I backed up all data + Directory Structures to DVD-Rs, then performed an Unconditional Format on the original Fixed Disk Drive.
The Original Drive on Controller SATA0 was a Western Digital "Caviar" Series, 320GB SATA.
So I purchased an exactly similar Drive from Fry's, for use on SATA1.
(how many know the story here already???!!!).
Set everything up per RAID Level 1, partitioned the Array for (3) Logical Drives:
C: for OS and Apps (70GB)
E: Data (120GB),
F: Data (120GB),
G: Swap File - 2x capacity of DRAM (10GB)
Then installed everything.
About 1 Month later, Original Drive dies, so it gets removed, and the machine gets setup to use a single Fixed Disk.
Shortly there after, the other drive commits suicide!
That was when I discovered the issues with the WD 320GB Caviar Series SATA Drives.
Current configuration uses (2) Seagate "Barracuda" Series 500GB SATA Drives.
Drive plans for the next Two Frankenstein-ish Machines ("me-Built" not "pre-built"):
a: Backup-Aux machine; RAID Level 1,
b: New File/Server; RAID Level 3 or? (min. 3 disk array)
Scott
