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My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted
articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things
Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your
submission to Dan Knight
.
I just had a conversation with a cook who runs a catering business
on the side and keeps his books on custom software on a PC. He had
been backing up, but a disk crash corrupted a file, and his books are
now messed up permanently. If his PC had been configured with a RAID
1* dual hard drive system, he would have been able to recover a lot
easier.
With the size of the hard drives, reduction of hard drive
warranties to one year, the complexity of software, the criticality
of small home office business systems, and the low cost involved,
there is no reason why every PC and Mac out there should not have a
RAID 1 dual redundant system as the standard base machine. With base
machines having cheap IDE hard drives from 40 GB to 120 GB and a
spare drive connector, that spare should be dedicated to a RAID
system.
This should not even be an option. It should be configured in the
base setup. It would be a great selling point.
Many people who buy computers have no clue how delicate an
assembly the whole system is. Hard drives have flying read/write
heads that hover at microinches above a surface spinning at very high
speed. The magnetic fields imprinted and read back are done so in a
probabilistic and not deterministic mode. Every bit is determined
statistically. The electronics looks for the most probable shape of
the energy and calls it a 1 or 0. Ninety nine percent of everybody
who uses a computer does not know this, and ninety nine percent of
those who do prefer not to think about it.
Obviously it will take some repackaging for iMacs, eMacs, iBooks,
and the like to fit in a second drive, but it would be a minimal
effort to make a RAID 1 (or even better, RAID 5*) system standard in
the G4 minitower products.
Redundancy can sell more machines, especially if Apple advertises
the fact. This is a down market for PCs. The Mac has a new very solid
Unix-based OS. Why not follow it up with a sold redundant standard
RAID configuration?
* RAID 1 is supported by Mac OS X 10.1 and later, although it is not
currently supported on the startup drive. See Apple
Knowledge Base Document 106594. RAID 5 systems spread data over
three or more drives in such a way that the failure of any single
drive can be covered by the data on the remaining drives. ed
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
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