Mike in Mystic wrote:

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.

To amplify... g installing the OS isn't bad. I've done it probably 200
times since Win3.x. It's everything else I use as a software developer that
takes the install/config time. Starting with FDISK it's about a 1.75 day
process. Office XP Developer, Visual Studio.NET, SQL Server 2000, ... This
time around I didn't install Delphi, Visual Studio 6 or IBM's DB2 database.
Hope I don't need 'em anymore.

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.

I'd had good luck for years too then :-( two failures in a few months.

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?

IIRC RAID 5 has performance and fault tolerance. More info here.
http://www.acnc.com/raid.html

brain fart
You could leave your transient data on RAID 0 for max speed and have the OS
and programs on mirrored (if you were concerned about fault tolerance).
Especially on separate controllers that would be very fast. I've read of
systems setup this way.
/brain fart

-- Mark