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?
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