PC maintenance

[xanthian]

I am looking at more the video/photo editing lines and storing multimedia (music, videos et al) may even move into sound recording software. Also the share trading and assorted spread sheets/documents.

Photo editing doesn't require anything special at all. Even a mobile phone can edit a photo in a timely manner, theoretically. Share trading, spreadsheets/documents, none of these require anything special either. A faster computer will let you transcode videos faster, but that's about it; it won't let you transcode them better. About the only real constraint you're putting on here is "I want a big hard drive". Considering I've seen terabyte drives in the ballpark of $200, that's rather easy to achieve. Anything you can buy will be able to play and transcode dvd-quality videos in a moderately timely manner, and allow whatever software you use to retrim those. The only reason you want to spend big on a better computer is if you're dealing with high definition video (blu-ray quality; Sony's HDR-SR1E being the most frequently purchased high-def camera by far right now, I believe).

A question for the IT nerdz. Can you have more than one HDD in the PC unit (one to run software and the other for permanent storage and is it expandable?

Yep. You just crack it open and pour in more RAM. Omm nom nom nom nom. (Not a serious reply. No, really, it's not.)

You can add more hard drives (and they'll appear as a D:... etc. drive in Windows Explorer), but the drives themselves all have fixed capacities. I think there's a raid scheme that allows you to dynamically grow the size of the array over time, but I don't think it offers redundancy. Obviously, with the first scheme you know which drive the data is on, so you can set one for software and the other for permanent storage, but with the second, you don't. The spendy way to achieve that is to buy a hard drive for windows, then a bunch of some other hard drive to set up a RAID array for "permanent" storage.

[Matso]

Raid array?

[browca04]

Don't bother.

Raid actually stands for "Really fancy term for a bit of server/corporate technology that has flowed downed to the consumer market that doesn't actually do shit"

It's a little known acronym.

[xanthian]

RAID works. If you want your data safe in case of fire, you need an off-site backup, but other than that, raid works.

(Redundant Array of Irresponsible Dicks -- err -- Irrelevant Dykes -- no -- Inexpensive Disks -- that's the one.)

The Redundant is redundant in the name as striping isn't a redundant array. The redundant arrays work, but realistically, you need to consider your data to be worth > $500 to make the investment even worthwhile on a small scale. And then if you're clueless, you won't know how to recover from a drive crash if it ever does occur.

And the above was written with the intention of being recursively confusing.

While I'm of the opinion that "RAID" on motherboards is in fact inferior to software raid, I haven't got a single complaint against true hardware raid other than the price. Is there something I'm not aware about for 3ware's offerings, Browca? Inform me, if so.

[browca04]

Raid in corporate arrays: Fantastic. Disk fails, auto rebuilt to a hot spare, and email sent to the admins saying "Replace this disk, it's fucked." That's fucking awesome...

Raid in a home setup is a waste. Data integrity is simply just not important enough. Back up your family photo's and music to a 500gb external drive. It's simpler and cheaper, and easier to recover from.

[xanthian]

That's debatable. While I'll accept an external hard drive as my "off-site backup" medium, people who use it as their sole backup (because their files are *so* important to them) rarely do so properly. Everyone who knows someone that has killed a flash drive because they edited a word document on it and didn't realise it had a limited write cycle, raise your hands now. Knocking a hard drive while it's spinning on your desk is a very real danger, and even if it wasn't, most of the external solutions use the cheapest, nastiest western digital drives not considered fit for consumer use.

It also requires you to expend effort on backing it up, which is almost always your single largest source of failure. That, and some people don't know how to backup (I had a case of someone's backup process of their quickbooks involving them copying the desktop shortcut to a flash drive), what they want backed up, nor the concept of a backup only working if the files are replicated on the external drive AND the hard drive (most people have them all in one place, if they can even find them).

I wholeheartedly agree that raid is overkill for 99% of people who claim their files are *that* important to them, because they're lying out of their asses, but the customer is always right. If someone tells me they can't lose their files, and is then too cheap to replace the dead hard drive in the raid array when it dies, that's really them changing their minds, not me advising them wrongly. If they get a hard drive failure and haven't performed a backup in, oh, say a month, since coming back from vacation, then it's better that they be presented with the option of a bill for a new hard drive to preserve the redundancy, than to have someone to bitch at for data recovery that just wasn't there.

Essentially, except for case of fire, RAID gives people what they're actually asking for, even if they are dirty dirty liars and are just storing family videos that never see the light of day again.