The purpose of RAID 1 or 5 is to have redundant copies of the data. In a properly setup redundant array a failed drive is simply replaced and it is restored from the other drives. You can actually set up a RAID system where this is done totally automatically (RAID 5 with a hot spare drive) but most of us home users will be comfortable with shutting down the system swapping out the bad drive and then letting it restore itself on boot up. There is an intermediate system with hot swappable drives but it tends to be more expensive to set up than the hot spare system these days.
-graywolf AlexG wrote: > Presumably so they aren't spinning for nothing, assuming they won't > power down on thier own. > > MTBF for hard disks is reported to be greatly exagerated -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
