Yea, the article from Pugetsys certainly reinforces the notion that Raid is not the 'bees' knees' of happy HD usage. Your input suggests tha you've had probs with it. I had considered it as a mean of finding my 'missing drv but, Gigabyte sprt. warned me that there might be issues especially when mixing Sata1 board and Sata2 drv. The other related issue Sata: how safe or stable is it? For how or why did adding a DVD writer (Sata2) to a Sata 1 port cause my HD to change from Basic to Dynamic and thus become 'unreadable'?

I got SCSI RAID (Raid level 1 - Mirroring) on my server and it works good. Handy as all the drives are hotswap and on rails. Makes for minumum downtime. i still backup very regularly to tape and dvds of course.

I had a SCSI Barracuda drive a few years ago and it was a flyer, so, if you could get a Raid SCSI setup going, as you have, i could imagine it would be something. Isn't a server a pc setup where a central pc controls/communicates with a number of others?

thats a cluster

So, a server is, likea work-horse, serving other pcs ie. for printing, data storage etc. Well, you'd need a reliable set up for that,

yup downtime = -$$$$$

Thats why servers generally have lots of hotswappable raid-ed disks and regularly back up

Hot-swapping Raid..sounds good. So, with a Raid 1 mirroiing setup, you're guaranteed 24/7/365 uptime with your server. That's a neat trick, where, because all the server data is mirrored onto multiple hot-swap disks, you can replace (hot-swap) the disk without powering down the system. I take it, that this type of setup uses HDDs, but what's it with the disks, Do they resemble CDs or DVDs?

by disk i mean HDD

Hard Disk drive

Then, it would seem that Raid is a really a super idea for businesses and large establishments but, maybe not for the home user.

Exactly. People who dont fully understand it, and who wont make full use of it, should stay away from it as for them it generally causes more trouble then its worth.