An interesting discussion, the only drawback of which is that it covers so many points that this thread could very quickly fragment! Never mind, its a very good question, so here's my bit...
At the risk of repeating old RAID / non-RAID discussions, I'm not at all convinced that RAID is a good investment in this type of environment. In my day job I worry about availability of mission-critical enterprise computing systems, and one of the topics that keeps coming up is the inappropriate focus on technology to solve availability problems. The key question for a slimserver is - what is most likely to cause data loss? (We shouldn't really be bothered about 24x7 uptime, unless we are using slimserver in say a hotel environment). I would assert that by far the most likely cause of data loss is human error - someone accidentally removes / overwrites / otherwise screws up the system. The next most likely cause of loss will be software error. A typical slimserver is loaded up to the line with dozens of bits of software, designed by a host of different people, probably never been used in your unique combination, most of it without any formal support. Thr chances of, say, your tagging program crapping over your precious tag data are quite high. And the least likely (though it will happen eventually) is hardware failure, and this is the only one that RAID will protect against. If you want to guard against the first two, you have to keep some kind of separate backup of the data. And if you do that, you don't need RAID to protect against hardware error. Personally I have a USB external drive which is NOT generally turned on or connected (to reduce the likelihood of getting corrupted) which I sync (currently using Windows synctoy) occasionally (when I think I've changed my library to the point that I'd be worried about loss). YMMV ! Ceejay -- ceejay ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ceejay's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=148 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
