[Leica] RAID controllers?

[scheng at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)]

A bit late but here is my experience.

The hard rule I learned from building and running a startup's I/T  
infrastructure a few years ago on a shoe string budget is never ever  
trust a single box doesn't matter how nice the box is. It is a single  
point of failure.

Disk life is fairly good these days but they do fail. RAID5 is a  
reasonable compromise but you should have 2 separate disks. One of  
which should remain offline and disconnected if at all possible.

For that small startup, I had a main file server with redundant disks  
internally that kept all the user data. I also had a PC under my desk  
onto which I took hourly snapshots of all the data from the server  
(just because I was paranoid and I *know* Murphy was not my friend).  
One day, the server crashed hard and when I went to have a look, the  
motherboard died. Either Northbridge or Southbridge chip had fried and  
scribbled over all the disks in the server in its death throes. My  
backup-to-the-backup copy became a slightly stale master copy all the  
sudden and I lost the use of my PC for a few days. Paranoia was  
justified. :)

I agree with those who says the OS should not be part of the RAID  
array if for no other reasons other than that RAID5 recovery can take  
a long, long, long time. If you have a deadline, the last thing you  
want to do is to sit there and wait, and wait, and wait, and pray that  
the OS can be recovered so you can actually boot your PC....

Regards,
Spencer