Easy Geek question

Gary wrote: "If I were building a machine and putting 3 harddrives in it,
I'd go the extra mile and install RAID. That way all drives store info on
the other and if one goes, you just swap it out with barely a hiccup. The
new drive immediately rebuilds itself to get you to 'safety' again within a
short time after installation."

I thought about using the raid but I did not since I was given the chip for
free from AMD and the motherboard was given to me by a friend that did not
like it. My total cost in building the chip was basically under 200.00
dollars since I already had or was given parts from friends. If I would
have gone with raid, I would have had to buy a new motherboard and possibly
a new chip. I put this computer together mostly from parts I already owned.
I went this route do to my money I had available to work on this project. I
did upgrade at the time from a 333 to a 2.0 g speed computer.

I am in the of process of looking to build a new computer and giving this
one to my mother. If I do build one I will go with raid since I do not have
any spare parts at the time and my friends are not upgrading at the time.

I only use restore to restore Windows and not to backup my files. I feel
comfortable with storing my data on one drive and my operating system on
another. I only backup my data but by copying the entire drive from one to
another. I have had a few crashes that I decided to just reformat my
operating system hard drive and start over. I have never lost any data they
way I do it. I have looked at adding a I/o card that would allow set up a
raid system but decided I have enough stuff in my computer. I also have a
200 g external hard drive that is connected by firewire that I store photos
on. I use this drive mainly with my digital camera when I go on trips. It
allows me to download pictures without a laptop. This was a freebie so I
use it. I really wanted a laptop but my mother bought me this for Christmas
last year.

Sarge