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Intel and Laptop RAID?
Might E. Mouse writes "The next version of Centrino, codenamed Napa, will support RAID. Intel is pushing it as a great way for business users to have added reliability and data backup on their work notebooks. Should boost gaming performance too. Anyone for 2.5GHz Pentium M, GeForce 7800 Go graphics and a 200GB RAID array? "
Because people don't backup on the network once a night and you go to a normal person and you ask them to do that they will stare at you with a blank face. Then if you show them how to do it the face will become more blank.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I saw in some of the postings that people DID NOT like the idea of laptop raid. Well, I'm wondering WHY NOT? Any customer who is likely to care about RAID probably isn't the most mobile user (hence not caring quite as much about batterly life). But, I'm afraid of doing certain things on my laptop for fear of it crapping out or worse, getting stolen. For me DATA redundancy is a MUST.
Additionally, Intel's new chips are supposedly VERY power efficient. If they can make future laptops with RAID sans the power problems... great.
But the real issue is probably COST. If you don't know what RAID is you aren't going to buy it....and its not going to increase cost THAT MUCH. But for those of us who DO know what raid is and either want increased performance or reliability.... there is a market! I don't really like having limited options when I'm making a choice, so having the OPTION of RAID is exactly what I WANTED. --Matt Wong
Raid is not for backups. Raid is intended to keep the machine running in the event of a hardware failure.
Indeed. I learned this in an important, almost "hard" way.
I had my home system on a 2x120GB raid1 setup, with no spare. I made daily full backups to another stand alone disk.
Imagine my surprise when they both started acting up, in the same way, at the same time. Eventually, they both completely died on the same day.
What had happened was my power supply had gone bad, though not died. It was outputting dirty power, and slowly damaged both drives. It also smoked the on board IDE controller, requiring an add on replacement.
Why it did not damage the disk i had backups on, I am not sure. The only thing I can think of is that I always spun the drive down after backups.
So, excellent point you have there.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
At the university I work some of the more overhyped IT courses lend laptops to their students. Of the about 1000 laptops in circulation there are maby 3-4 dead HDs a year, and it's all due to generous amounts of gravity. :D
/greger
I'd rather have a wifi link and have my scsi hosted in a nice safe place. Make it 'mirror' over a wifi.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Seems like desktops are becoming smaller, quieter and more efficient while notebooks are becoming larger, noisier and hungrier. Whatever happened to portability?
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.