# Help me select my new PC. **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 19, 2010, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-select-my-new-pc/533085 "2010-03-19T23:50:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Cascade](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Cascade](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cascade)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-select-my-new-pc/533085/21 "2010-03-20T20:45:07Z")
> [@Kinthalis](#): > > There’s some misunderstanding of RAID here. Raid 1 is a mirror RAID. The two drives will mirror each other, making loss of data due to hardware failure extremely unlikely. > > Instead, I would partition the mirrored 1 TB raid. Say 250 Gigs for the OS and programs/games, the rest for data storage. That first partition will be nice and fast. Right. I was kinda stupid there, I was a bit too hasty and just assumed in was raid 0. Still, I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you have some kind of really specific setup. It’s usually better just to get an external hard drive and backup to it once a week/month. Raid 1 still won’t protect against accidental deletions and will still expose the hard drives to quite a bit of wear, an external hard drive won’t. ---
**Author:** ![Merneith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/57b2e6/32.png) [@Merneith](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Merneith)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-select-my-new-pc/533085/22 "2010-03-20T21:04:59Z")
The other downside to RAID backups is that the backups are located on-site, in the big bulky computer. In an emergency, you could grab a USB drive and run. Or a better solution would be to store your files online somewhere. But if there’s a fire or a tree falls on your house or something and the computer goes up in flames, it won’t help any to have a RAID running. ---
**Author:** ![Kinthalis](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kinthalis/32/16084_2.png) [@Kinthalis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kinthalis)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-select-my-new-pc/533085/23 "2010-03-20T23:23:14Z")
Regardless of whether you have RAID or not, an external backup solutions is something you should have. The RAID is mostly a convenience thing. It’ll be easier to restore a RAID partition than restore a backup from a NAS. Plust the two in concert mean that unless there’s a house fire or something like that. your data should be safe. ---
**Author:** ![drachillix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/48db29/32.png) [@drachillix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drachillix)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2010, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-select-my-new-pc/533085/24 "2010-03-21T02:01:29Z")
RAID is not a backup, its just a means of providing hardware redundancy. ---
**Author:** ![Merneith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/57b2e6/32.png) [@Merneith](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Merneith)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2010, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-select-my-new-pc/533085/25 "2010-03-21T21:23:30Z")
Technically speaking, sure. Practically speaking, a distinction without a difference. The point is to have your data saved somewhere else in case of disaster. The disaster could be a hard drive failure or a tornado. A RAID set up will protect you from the first. It won’t do squat for the later. OTOH, if you skip the RAID and setup a realtime backup online, you’ll be protected from both and you won’t have to worry about the RAID itself causing instabilities. RAIDs were originally intended for providing redundancy while stringing together cheap & dodgy hard drives. Redundancy’s never a bad thing, of course. But for a home pc with one or two drives, quality hardware and a solid backup plan will get the same results. ---
**Author:** ![carlb](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carlb/32/5930_2.png) [@carlb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carlb)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2010, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-select-my-new-pc/533085/26 "2010-03-22T13:48:46Z")
Thanks for all the input everyone; you’ve certainly given me some things to think about, particularly my choice of hard drive configuration. I will certainly have an external drive for back-up (it’s part of my “disaster” plan), but I sort of neglected in my own mind that I’m much more mobile now than I used to be. We live part of the year in Florida, so a lot of my crucial data will reside on external drives anyway. The more I think about it, the more I realize that on-board storage for the desktop doesn’t need to be particularly large, or bullet-proof. Again, thanks for the input. Time to drop back and re-think a few things. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2010, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-select-my-new-pc/533085/27 "2010-03-22T14:12:59Z")
For what it’s worth - if I were spending $2200+ on a home PC, I’d spend half of that on a 30" display. That would still leave enough money for a pretty nice Core-i7 system. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-select-my-new-pc/533085.md?page=1)