[ILUG] ITX advice

[Timothy Murphy]

On Tue 11 Sep 2007, Gavin McCullagh wrote:

> > > - Does it need RAID or so for reliability?
> >
> > I'm not really a RAID convert.
> > I haven't had any problems with my SCSI disks,
> > and people seem to have as many problems with RAID disks
> > as with SCSI disks.
> > But this is probably an old-fashioned point of view.
>
> RAID and SCSI are not mutually exclusive for disks.  You can have SCSI or
> SATA (or IDE) disks in RAID arrays.
>
> You might be right that SCSI would be more reliable than SATA (opinion
> seems to vary), but 2x SCSI disks in RAID1 would likely be more reliable
> again.  It would of course also be more costly.  I always suppose that a
> disk failure is inevitable and although I may have backups, I'd really
> rather buy the extra disk rather than have to restore an entire system from
> backups whenever the failure finally happens.

Thanks for all the responses.
I'm not completely converted to RAID, for the following reasons:

1. One has to make a rough estimate of the probability of various disasters.
In my (very limited) experience, disk failure is way down the list,
occuring maybe once every 4 years.

Top of the list is idiocy on my part, which is responsible for 90%
of the problems I encounter,
with a frequency of about once every 3 months.

Adding the complication of RAID is likely to compound this,
even if it makes disk failure less likely
(or rather, less likely to have a disastrous effect).

2. Second are acts of God such as blown fuses,
floods (from washing machines), heavy objects falling on computers, etc.
Probable frequency: once per year.

3 Third on the list is the folly of other humans,
eg the action of my kind neighbour in turning off my ADSL modem,
on the grounds that nothing was connected to it.
(The computer was connected by WiFi.)
Probable frequency: once per year.