[Leica] RAID controllers?

[hartzell at alerce.com (George Hartzell)]

Gary Todoroff writes:
 > 
 > >I disagree w/ Gary's statement, there's only one small reason not to
 > >put the OS onto the RAID too.
 > 
 > Right, George, like there's only one small reason to untie your 
 > lifeboat from the ship as it's going down. Leave the RAID for data 
 > only. If anything happens with the RAID, you still have your OS disk 
 > to boot from in order to diagnose what is wrong. A broken RAID is 
 > thin ice enough, even  worse if your OS has to skate on it.
 > [...]

I still disagree with Gary's statement.

I use RAID 1 or 5 or 6 or z because I'm fundamentally lazy and risk
averse.  I'd rather not have to restore anything from my backups when
a disk dies, I'd rather not risk loosing anything I've done in the
interval between my last backup and right now, and I sometimes worry
that my backups will be bad.

I don't want to have to reload all of my image files from my backups
when my disk dies, so they live on redundant storage.

I don't want to have to reload any of my writings, programs, emails,
slideshows, web pages, etc..., so my home directory lives on redundant
storage.

I don't want to have to reinstall photoshop and lightroom and
omnigraffle and, and, and, and track down the license keys for them,
and reconfigure my networking etc...  so all that stuff lives on
redundant storage.

In each of those cases I could always restore from my backups or
reload from the original applications, but RAIDs are easier, which
lets me be lazier.  It's also true that I could reinstall my apps and
stuff from their original media but it's so much easier just to
include them in the backup cycle (Time Machine rocks!).

It's true that I could set up a pair of disks in a mirror for my data
and another pair of disks in a mirror for the OS and that way I could
be relaxed and lazy, but in this age of 1TB disks I can't see a reason
to (other than performance, which is another can of worms).

If you trust a RAID to increase the reliabilty of your data storage,
then why don't you trust it to increase the reliability of your other
stuff?  If you don't trust it to increase the reliability of your
other stuff, what's it giving you when you use it for your data
storage?

RAID only makes it more likely that I can be lazy.  I still worry
about double disk failures or coffee spills or theft and so I still do
backups.

Even though I'm running everything from RAID'ed storage there's
nothing that stops me from popping the Mac OS X DVD or the FreeBSD
live CD or any of the live linux CD's into a machine (depending on
what the machine's running) and booting from them.

One thing to note is that I have *no* relevant experience with RAID on
Windows, so there might be something fundamentally different over
there.

g.