>> Tom Jennings Wrote:
>>
>> In fact I think that RAID is a waste of time and money and
>> complexity; you can get a lot of inexpensive, simple and
>> reliable performance by using one EIDE per drive (with
>> CDROM a slave on
>> any) and "big" drive(s) chosen to be right at the beginnign
>> of the steep-price knee. Split archives and lists onto
>> drives/mount points, your oldest drive as OS, one of (two?)
>> new, big drives rsync -ua one to the other for "mirror",
>> etc. Cheap, simple, fast, easy, changable later, etc.
>>
For on-line archive type applications, I would agree that "rsync" type
solutions can be quite effective. You can even use more expensive, smaller,
faster drives as the primary and use really big cheap drives for the online
copies.
HOWEVER, I would NOT use this type of solution for any transitory type data,
or any data which required the secondary to be a 100% consistant copy of the
primary.
The failure/performance points is RAID, have been covered, and I choose
between them based on the exact application [with software raid being the
more common choice]