On Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 12:00:01AM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 18:49 +0100, Chris G wrote:
However, given the reliability of hard disks these days is it really worth it? In the twenty or so years that I've had PCs I don't think I've ever lost data to a hard disk failure, anyway everything that's important is backed up off-site.
oooh there is a brave man, tempting fate like that :)
*kerchunk* *buzzzzz* *kerchunk*
I have had a couple of disks do that, but only after showing some signs of failure beforehand. Like one that was sticky starting and needed a quick thump to spin up, after about the second 'start with a thump' I copied all the data off it. It carried on working in non-critical roles for quite a while after that.
I've also had a couple which have developed a few bad blocks before rapidly deteriorating into uselessness, again I've had ample time to remove all imprtant data before the end.
There is also a performance gain to be had if it is done right too
That's true but I'm very rarely disk performance bound - in fact I'm very rarely any sort of performance bound except the speed of my ADSL connection. Speeding up either my processor or my hard disk would probably save me 50mS per day! :-)