lars wrote:

-    /usr/ports/sysutils/smartmontools
    can help you monitor your HDDs

But if your disk is a hardware RAID of any kind, and you cannot see through the controller to individual disks, then you'll only be told about one of the disks, I would presume. That's where a CLI comes in, but I think they are scarce for the low-end controllers you see on desktop systems. Or just rebooting daily and hoping the RAID BIOS will report a SMART error in time.

Even given that, smartmontools should be on everyone's list of "must have" ports.

-    RAID 0 doubles the chances of HDD failure and thereby data loss

Agreed. But my presumption is that the actual chances of hardware failure are pretty small. Out of all the disks I've been responsible for in some way over the years (certainly hundreds), the actual number of failures I can remember is about a handful, and at least two of those came with some warning.

Actually, I suspect a RAID 0 more than doubles the chance something bad happening. A single bad disk may be just good enough to be recoverable in some way, whereas the same errors in a RAID 0 could be curtains. I certainly wouldn't do 0 without a frequent, automatic back-up strategy on anything which wasn't truly disposable.

    e.g. Mini-ITX boards are cheap and fast enough for this purpose.

Or the PC you just replaced which now has an ebay value of not-enough-to-be-worth-it... :-)

The real expense is usually time. Especially for home-based machines, backups become a chore, or you're up until 2am and just can't be bothered turning on the tape drive or whatever. And a disk just drive knows when it hasn't been backed up recently ;-)

--Alex

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