Zune HD = iPod touch? Uh, no....

by Christopher Breen, Macworld.com

Blame it on the rain, the resulting muck and mire, or the redwood curtain that separates Cupertino from Redmond, but it appears that news travels very slowly between Apple and Microsoft. How else can you explain this statement from Chris Stephenson—general manager of global marketing for Microsoft Zune regarding the just-announced Zune HD (as quoted by CNET’s Ina Fried)?

RAIDfail: Don't use RAID 5 on small arrays

Big storage companies stopped recommending RAID 5 a couple of years ago. But I still see small 4-drive arrays touting RAID 5 for home and small office use.

 

Big mistake. You want to save money, but you also want to keep your data. RAID 5 isn’t worth it.

 

What’s the problem?

 

The problem is that RAID 5 only protects against a single disk failure. But SATA drives are spec’d at one Unrecoverable Read Error (URE) every ~12.5 TB.

 

Let’s do the math.

Better than RAID: the new DroboPro

RAID is a bad idea for home users since its management complexity and failure modes create more problems than it solves. But protection from 1 - or better yet 2 - drive failures is a very GOOD idea.