Low End Mac Reader Specials

TypeStyler For Mac OS X is Now Shipping! Download The Free Fully Functional 60 Day Tryout at www.typestyler.com

Poker Mac Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker application such as Full Tilt Poker Mac.

Compare products like desktop computers, apple laptops, apple macs, and LCD Monitors side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for new mobile phones, sat nav systems, or MP3 players. The Ciao online shopping community makes searching products easy for you.

My Turn

Why Don't All Macs Come with RAID?

Robert Crane - 2002.11.04

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.

Recent My Turn articles

Links for the Day

Recent Content on Low End Mac

Recent Deals



Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2010 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
  LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
  Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
  Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
  PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
  Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.

  • Mac of the Day: Mac IIfx, Mar. 1990 - This 'wicked fast' 40 MHz Mac trumped the 33 MHz DOS world.
  • List of the Day: Mac mini List is for anyone using or contemplating a Mac mini
    • Channels
     Power Macs
     iMac Channel
     iBook/PowerBook
     MacInSchool
    Computer Profiles
     iMac
     Power Mac
     PowerBook/iBook
     Performas
     Mac Clones
     Older Macs
     Lisa • NeXT
    Editorial Archive
    Mac Daniel's Advice
    Email Lists
    LEMchat (uses AIM)
    Online Tech Journal
    Consumer
     advice, reviews
     guides, deals
    Software
    Apple History
    Best of the Web
     Best of the Mac Web surveys
    Miscellaneous Links
      Used Mac Dealers
     Video Cards
     Mac OS X
     Mac Linux
     Macspeak
     RAM Upgrades
    About Low End Mac
    Site Contacts

    Open Link

    Support LEM

    Affiliates

    The Apple Store
    .mac
    iTunes Store
    Club Mac
    MacMall
    iResQ
    ExperCom
    eBay
    Amazon.com
    PayPal
    PCMall
    PC Zone
    Crucial Memory

    Our advertising is handled by BackBeat Media. For detailed price quotes and advertising information, please contactat BackBeat Media (646-546-5194). This number is for advertising only.