I saw an interesting post on Slashdot not too long ago where someone asked the a question regarding a RAID setup. What I found interesting was not so much their question, rather the comments from the replies.

If you are considering using RAID in your setup, this is a great thread to read. One commenter put it best:

[T]he reason for using RAID is NOT as a backup. RAID != Backup.
RAID is for redundancy and performance increases.

This is a great point. RAID will protect you from drive failures but is not a backup solution as if you lose your data on one drive, you have lost it on all of them.

Personally, I don’t see a need for an end user machine to really have a RAID setup as it is expensive and not cost effective for performance gains when compared to better hardware.

Does anyone have any personal experience or thoughts on this?

Two quad core QX9775 processors, 800MHz FBDIMM 4GB RAM.. doesn’t sound like anything out of your grasp, right?

But how about if you put in 24 SSDs totaling 6TB in a RAID setup? Yep, that’s a bit extreme.

The crazy thing is that it worked. It could break a speed of 2GB per second. It could open the entire MS Office Suite – all programs – in half a second. It could open everything in the Windows start menu (53 programs) in just over 18 seconds. It can perform a 700MB DVD transfer in 0.8 seconds.

Quite ridiculous.

And the most amazing thing is that the SSDs can be knocked against each other while in use and still work. (See the 3:42 mark below).

Watch the video and see for yourself.

Again, ridiculous. But cool.

This is what makes SSD great, and also what makes our existing hard drives suck.