Oh man! It sucks. I commented back with some tips.

Knoppix saves lives. Not an alternative to a good backup strategy mind you, but hell of a life line to have. :)

I wish i learned from you…
see my blog

My “backup policy” is essentially just to have a copy of anything important in several places – coursework from school was on the school servers, my laptop and a thumb drive, updated whenever possible, most of the contents of My Documents is mirrored between the PC and the laptop, updated whenever I have anything important enough to warrant it.

In the event of a crash of either machine all I lose is a ton of legitimately acquired *cough* videos that I don’t have the space or inclination to keep 2 copies of (and the stuff I haven’t watched yet is normally on both anyway, so I don’t have to worry about transferring it when I want to watch it)

It’s probably not the best way, but I’m lazy, I don’t have yet the fear instilled by experience of a fatal hard drive crash (just a few buggered Windows installations, and they gave me time to evacuate data) and hard drive space enough to backup everything is kinda expensive – I would want to be storing something new on it to justify the cost

Fr3d – how about Hitachi Ultrastar series – 15K RPM! LOL

I feel kinda inadequate with my 7200 RPM drives right here. Sigh…

From what I’ve heard, you’d use RAID0 for the express purpose of increasing speed for temporary data – things like squid cache, where you don’t need data reliability, but getting data fast is very important. I’ve also heard the same thing of the reiser4 filesystem…

[quote post=”1763″]Of course in my mind Fault Tolerance > Speed but I can see how that may not always be the case.[/quote]
Indeed – If you want real speed you’d buy a Western Digital Raptor (or Raptor X) and then use RAID 1 ;)

It has it’s ups and downs :p

There are some bits that I really like, such as the search in the start menu, which makes it much faster to find a program. The mobility center for laptops is pretty good too.

However both my installations (PC and Laptop) have worse driver installation procedures than Windows 95… But I think that’s something to do with the ISO, since it’s the same problem on two completely different machines. I did manage to fix it once, but it soon broke again and I haven’t managed to mend it again.

Bottom line, once you get used to it, and get it configured how you like it, it’s not that bad :)

Ah, ok. That kinda makes sense. Of course in my mind Fault Tolerance > Speed but I can see how that may not always be the case.

Btw, I see you’re on Vista now. Are you loving it or are you hating it?

[quote post=”1763″]Is RAID 5 that much slower though? I always figured that if you are RAID’ing anyway, you might as well have some built in fault tolerance.[/quote]
It’s slower for writing (the same speed as one single drive) but it’s (usually) much faster for reading.

[quote comment=”5433″]RAID 0 is good for very fast storage of non-important stuff, such as games.[/quote]

Is RAID 5 that much slower though? I always figured that if you are RAID’ing anyway, you might as well have some built in fault tolerance.

[quote comment=”5434″]… Yeah i remember windows not booting up because it didn’t have firefox ;)[/quote]

LOL. Actually, windows is pretty much self contained, so there is not many applications that can be considered crucial from the OS functionality. I mean crucial for me being able to work on the machine without getting pissed off. I can’t browse the web with IE6 – it just can’t be done.

crucial applications such as Firefox.

… Yeah i remember windows not booting up because it didn’t have firefox ;)