My home machine is set up with 3 hard drives. Two of them are high speed 10,000 rpm SATA drives configured in a RAID 0 format. This means that the computer writes 50% of the data to both disks simultaneously. If I have a 100MB file, 50MB would be written to disk 0, with the other 50% written to disk 1. This makes the process of reading and writing the hard drives VERY fast.
But alas, when one of these disks becomes unstable, life gets seriously disrupted. I'm currently in the process of a hard drive failure. It's really annoying. Periodically, my computer will go from running full steam ahead to a black all loss of power screen, in the blink of an eye. When I view the system logs, it tells me that it encountered a bad block of memory.
Then this weekend the system refused to boot up at all. The BIOS would start, but the RAID array controller would start to panic, and report that disk 0 was offline. Thus ending that boot sequence. I kept trying though, perhaps about 50 times. This went on for a while, until I finally called for Tech Support. The nice Hindu Indian sounding woman suggested I tried rebooting. With teeth clenched to prevent a sarcastic comment about rebooting for the nTH time, I pushed the button.
I'll be darned if the thing didn't start right back up again as if nothing had ever happened. The Indian woman spoke English well enough to laugh at me. And then she suggested I do a full backup immediately, and darn it, she's right.
It's always a bit humbling to do a full backup. After about 6 DVD's of data, you begin to wonder, "Do I really need all this crap?"
I hope I never find out.
