From: "Geo" 

"Frank Haber"  wrote in message
news:4215f193$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> Y'know, I don't think I've ever seen a review of motherboard or PCI-card
> hardware mirroring from a reliability and recovery standpoint.

Well I can answer some of your questions for NT's software mirroring.

> Do the utils work?

Very limited utils, rebuild, check, defrag, but yes they do work.

> Can you, at
> least temporarily, mirror to a slighly different drive for recovery, if
the
> failed HD is long out of production and you can't buy a dupe?

Yes no problem, as long as the drive is bigger than the partition you want to mirror.

>  Is there any time advantage in pre-striping a spare?

Can't be done, when you build a mirror it has to mirror every sector so
it's sort of like a format. Takes time and the machine will lag while it's
rebuilding.

>  What about HDs on the shelf?  Keeping
> a HD without spinning it up every six months used to be a no-no
(stiction).
> Have lubes improved that much, or are you going to have to keep a 5-12V
bench
> supply in the closet and mark the calendar to spin up all your spares
every
> New Year's and Fourth of July?

I've kept HDs on the shelf for years and they just work, this has never
been an issue for me.

> OTOH, the horror stories I heard about certain (parallel-)ATA RAID0 setups
> early on seem to have settled down.

The big drawback that I've seen is that if you patch a machine that's
mirrored and the patch is a nasty one that trashes the machine, then the
mirror copy is useless for recovery. So you end up doing a reinstall. Some
of the hardware raid setups can be a pain in the ass to get going because
they require special drivers or whatever and that can extend the recovery
time by making the install take forever.

> writing/MFT expansion, etc.)  I've seen *nothing*.  This is strange.  I
don't
> know why I've never used mirroring.  It's not as though those monster,
cheap
> HDs don't ever fail.

Mirroring is great protection against a HD failure, but that's all it's
protection against. It really doesn't replace a good tape backup but
sometimes you have so much static data that it's just a better solution
because tape is too expensive and slow.

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5