Mirrored Hard Drives

As most of you know, hard drive prices have fallen dramatically, while capacity continues to increase. In addition, the quality of drives is increasing. Some months ago I noticed that the drives I sell are "RAID Certified".  RAID, an acronym for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks. The technology can be used to improve performance or to increase reliability. I also noticed that the motherboards I normally use have RAID built into them (meaning they can utilize RAID hard drives). I saw that for about $55 extra I could sell machines with RAID Mirrored hard drives.

This means that though Windows sees a single hard drive, there are really two drives and everything is written to both at once. I always install software that monitors the drives to alert you if there is an issue. This means that even if a hard drive crashed, the other drive would continue and you would get a notice indicating that you need to replace the failed drive and no longer have redundancy. Your work would not be interrupted. I can come in with a new hard drive, remove the old one, install the new one, and then tell the software to mirror the current drive to the new drive. You would be inconvenienced with a 10 minute shutdown at a time of your choosing (so I could replace the drive), instead of a major stoppage when the hard drive crashed.