[conspire] Partitioning problem

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):

> Actually I find the idea of RAID for reliability a bit flawed myself-
> if they are in the same case and share the same power supply you are
> just as likely to fry two or three drives at a time as just one.  

It's certainly no substitute for backup, which addresses that and
numerous other failure modes.  However, single-drive failures do happen
all the time, and having to revert to your most recent backup can
really, really suck.

> Well, if you want a high-performance system, you just give it enough
> RAM to make swap performance fairly irrelvant anyway... 

That's the theory, but servers tend to be built with the possibility of
sudden resource-consumption surges in mind, above and beyond that.  
My bitty box (housing my Web server) was always beefy enough that it
survived a couple of slashdottings without too much strain -- including 
back when it was an 64MB-RAM EISA 486 with, yep, a pair of fast SCSI drives.