I use the Promise Fasttrack 66 RAID cards in small stores.  I have two
drives set up in each server as a mirrored configuration, and each night
the server backs up the data to a seperate computer on site.  This gives
2.5 points of failure - if a single HD fails the server keeps chugging
along without a single complaint.  I have to down the server to replace
the bad HD (It supports hot swap, but does not support dynamic
rebuilding - meaning it won't re-mirror a drive while it's in use).

If the server crashed so hard both hard drives are toast then I have the
other on site backup.  The event that all three hard drives are
destroyed at the same time without the store being destroyed as well are
so remote as to not be worried about.  We don't care much about the data
if the store is completely gone (fire, acts of nature, etc), so an off
site backup tips the cost/return on investment scale.

I used one in my personal machine for awhile in a striped configuration
(block one on the first drive, block two on the second, block three on
the first, etc) with two 7200rpm 20GB hard drives, and it performed
noticibly better than another machine with a faster processor that was
using two 10,000rpm scsi hard drives.

They are not considered 'professional', though, and I wouldn't depend on
them completely - ie, keep another reliable backup.  I've never had a
problem with them though, and they've been in place in over 12 stores
for nearly a year now - pretty severe use.

-Adam

Derek Chan wrote:

>With all these worries about hard-disk crashing, has anybody consider or
>even purchase RAID controllers as an insurance. See link
>http://www.promise.com
>
>I have no idea about this product...been reading something about
>RAID...which stands for "Redundant Array of Indepedent(Inexpensive) Disks"
>
>If what they are selling is what I think it is, then you insert this card
>into your PC with a number of hard disks, example 4 hard-disk. If one
>hard-disk crashes, then information from the other 3 hard-disk can be used
>to regenerate the lost data.
>
>It is also suppose to make the 4 disk look like one large disk (maybe like
>total of 3 disks capacity)
>
>It is also suppose to be faster, as data are stored across multiple disk,
>and retrival is faster because 3 disks are spinning to get data
>simultaneously..
>
>I thought such things are availiable only for HIGH END COMPUTERS, and I am
>surprise it is avaliable for PC. Anybody tried this product before ? and Did
>I understand what RAID is correctly ?
>
>Derek
>
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