New rule: RAID 1 for all boot disks
The boot drive in my main desktop just died. Again. Data drives I don’t mind failing - I can just restore them from backup. Boot drives, however, take an entire day to repair as I’ve got to re-install everything all over again. While it is a handy practice to do every few years, a total reinstall is incredibly frustrating when it’s forced upon me.
So, I’ve decided on a new rule: all my boot drives shall henceforth be RAID 1 volumes. The downtime is much better: Hardware replacement time is just a few minutes and I can work off the laptop during the RAID rebuild. That time savings is well worth the extra $100 for a duplicate drive. (I tend to use small drives for the boot drive, then big drives for a separate data volume).
