I'm lucky enough at work to have a RAID-5 setup with hot swap on my
desktop machine (along with two 3+ghz P4 Xeons and 2GB ram). It just
showed up on my desk a couple months ago because I guess we needed more
machines for our simulations and I had the oldest computer. It's a 6
drive array, several hundred GB of SCSI drives. I don't even know what
to do with it all. It's a little more than I think I'd do for a shop
computer. My 5 year old HP is fine for that.


Greg wrote:
IIRC RAID 5 has performance and fault tolerance.


RAID 5 is what the big boys use. It has some overhead but if you spread the
stripes across a lot of drives it isn't bad.
This was crucial in AS/400s where the loss of one drive usually meant you lost
all of them.