dmorison - 6:58 pm on Aug 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

I personally think RAID is a bit over the top for a workstation. It is intended for servers that require high-availability where (in some high-end hot-swap models) you can simply swap a failed RAID member out without interruption to the service.

With RAID you will be paying a lot for redundancy, only having the effective hard disk space of less than one of the drives, despite there being multiple drives in your computer.

If you choose to go without RAID, you will have the space of all your hard drives at your disposal - a lot more disk space for [probably] a lot less money.

How's this for a thought:

Hard drives are massive these days; so segregate your OS/APPLICATIONS and DATA accross two physical drives. Have your operating system and applications on drive C:, and keep your work-in-progress on drive D:, and do a regular local backup of your data from D: to C:.

Then:

If C: fails you just re-install your OS and applications on a new drive C:

If D: fails, you just restore your data from the back-up on C:.