On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 07:57:10PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> and for all of them RAID gives no real protection. unfortunately - it 
> gives people feeling of being well protected from data loss

I am not sure what this philosophical discussion is about.

Some people may not be able to do hourly backups and may not be able to
tolerate losing all changes since last night's backup. Storing data on raid
does not protect the data in an absolute sense, but doubles your chances to
survive a very common hardware failure even on a simple raid 1 - at a *very*
cheap price.

Your milage may vary, but at work we we have *all* workstations equipped
with raid for the main data partition - after we lost 4 or 5 days within
one year by dying hard disks. Even if we calculate this at the internal
costs only, we could probably buy 20 - 30 SATA Raptors (maybe more, didn't
check the latest prices).

Our servers, of course, have had raid even before that bad year, and 
additionally are mirrored (rsync'd nightly) off-site. We do more to
protect our data, sometimes to quite silly levels (involving bank safes,
cryptographic hashes and a notary). Still I would not want to miss the
raid.

So, I know you said "raid is overrated" but your arguments sounded like
you would like to say "let's forget about raid".

Martin