>
>> Now you put a 2nd drive onto to mirror the first and provide redudancy.
>
>From past experience that doesn't necessarily help.
>
>The system runs fine until there is a power cut.
>When you try to bring the system back up you fid that several
>of the disks in the system do not want to start [1].
>RAID wont help, you need that tape backup (and hope that
>is still readable).
>

I guess if you're only talking older hardware, sure. But this is the exact
setup we've used to run stand alone sun's (ss20's, u1's, u2's, netra t1's, etc)
as service machines (DNS, DHCP, etc) at work for a long long time.

With hundreds and hundreds of machines we experience single disk outages. Not
once in recent memory (last 6-7 years) have I seen spindle lockup on both
drives after a power cycle...But, with everything mirrored (including swap)
one can survive a single disk outage and fix it during a more convenient time.

James