PPRuNe Pop,
Anything you need. Just let us know. We will be here.
Mac the Knife,
The cost on the W.D Raptors is $140.00 U.S. Delivered.
Western Digital Raptor 36GB SATA WD360GD 10,000 RPM 8MB Hard Drive
It is a little higher than standard IDE Drives, but still not too far out there. I do keep an extra drive in my comp, that I copy my data I cannot live without on it, just in case, and periodically I burn it to disk. You can never be too careful.
As for RAID 0, I used to think like that too. If you only have one drive in your comp and it fails, how much of your data do you lose? Nine times out of 10, all of it. With two drives on RAID 0 you do have twice the chance to lose a drive (Just like with a Twin Engine Aircraft) and if one does fail all your data is lost. But when you look at the benefits of what you gain, it is well worth it in both price and chance of data loss.
I have seen things like Power Supplies blow and take out everything plugged in to it including Hard Drives, so even backing up to a spare hard drive really is not enough. But that is another long story.
Take Care,
Richard