Originally posted by: athfbum
why are people so worried about drive failure when hard drives have a very low probability of failure. I've only had 1 hard drive fail on me ever, and I have owned 8 computers
I agree that this risk is overblown. However, with any RAID you have an increased risk of failure even without considering drive failure. The RAID implementation and its maintenance are potential points of failure. Going RAID 0 without an external backup of some sort is really just asking for trouble.
Why?
(1) The number of drives increases, increasing the probability of failure.
(2) RAID 0 has more storage capability, therefore more data could be at risk.
(3) The RAID implementation itself could fail. BIOS failure, code failure, lose RAID info on HDs. (Heard it happen.)
(4) The partition info could be lost. (Seen it happen.)
Keeping the OS + data on the same RAID array complicates setup and maintenance. Most implementations end up separating these. I'd suggest 1 drive for OS/swap/personal folders, a RAID array of some sort for programs + data, and a separate external drive for backups. This will be superior in performance and reliability to most set-ups, but of course cost more in drives.