I thought about that, but at the moment my storage needs are pretty high.
I've only had this system for about a month and have used a full 200 Gb of
storage space. I turn over a lot of space with multimedia work - I've
gotten pretty involved in making home movies with my DV camcorder.
Reinstalling stuff IS a bummer, but it really isn't that big a deal. I've
done it many times, and it usually takes maybe 2-3 hours max. Not that big
a deal, IMO. I routinely backup data to CD's, and now that I have the DVD
writer, I've been using some DVD-RW discs (basically extra 4.3 Gb hard
drives). I would bet I only have about 10-20 Gb of "critical" data that I
need to make sure I don't lose. Plus I have access to network storage space
(about 100 Gb for my personal use) that I can access from home, too.

In all the years I've been using computers, I've only had one hard drive
fail. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I think that the mfgs have gotten pretty
good at quality control.

The other big issue is that the RAID 1 arrays suffer pretty significantly in
performance compared to the RAID 0 arrays. What's the point of having all
the processor, memory and video performance if you handcuff it with a slow
data storage/retrieval architecture?

If this were business intensive and I couldn't handle a day of downtime,
worst case, then I probably would do the same as you and go for the RAID 1,
but then I'd probably go with a terabyte of total storage (500 Gb usable).

Mike

"Mark Jerde" wrote in message
...
Mike in Mystic wrote:

500 Gb RAID 0 hard drive set up

My laptop & desktop each lost a hard drive in the past 12 months. Bummer
reinstalling everything, and there were some things I didn't have backed
up... sigh

RAID 0 is "Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance." IMO this is too
risky. My next desktop will be mirrored hard drives at a minimum.

My $0.02

-- Mark