Friday, April 18, 2008

Desktops, Servers, and Networks, oh MY!: RAID - Not Just for Servers Anymore

Desktops, Servers, and Networks, oh MY!: RAID - Not Just for Servers Anymore

RAID, once found only in network server and on a very rare occasion, and on a very expensive desktop computer system. Any desktop years ago that had true hardware RAID installed was a very expensive and rare site to see. often, it was for someone who had way too much money and needed something to brag about. In legit cases however, if there were a desktop with hardware RAID installed it would also be acting as a server in some capcity or the user was just paranoid and didn't want to save anything in public space such as a network server.

RAID - Not Just for Servers Anymore

With the cost of RAID redundancy coming of age in terms of pricing, it's no wonder that there are more desktops sold with the option of RAID redundancy. Due to the successfully change from the IDE standard many years ago to SATA and SAS, RAID at the desktop level is much more consumer friendly in terms of price and therefore many more desktops are shipping with redundancy hard drive redundancy and fail over being built into them. RAID is no longer only for servers.

I think this is great and wish it could have been so inexpensive to add RAID to desktops many years ago. I know that it would have saved many people a lot of pain as their computers took a dive and the hard drive they stored much of their data on was never backed up.

What prompted me to add this post is during a recent installation of Vista Ultimate edition on a desktop computer system, I noticed a button on the installation drive selection window. It said load drivers and so out of curiosity, I clicked it. Behold, an option to add third party disk drivers to Vista. This was once a part of the text based installation of XP and Windows 2000, but now it's been nicely GUI-fied.

Oddly enough though, when you click the button to add disk drivers to the Vista installation, you are asked to insert a diskette containing the drivers. So just as it's becoming common place to see RAID installed in desktops, it becoming just as rare to see floppy drives installed on new systems.



Desktops, Servers, and Networks, oh MY!: RAID - Not Just for Servers Anymore