Well turned my computer on this morning and one of my hard drives was dead. Just like that, working last night, totally dead this morning (doesn't even click).

Luckily it was part of a RAID 5 array so I didn't loose any data and I can still run my system even though one of the drives is missing in the array.

The dive is only three months old and I have to pay shipping to replace it, but $20 is worth it not to loose all that data, so I don't feel too bad.

:)

I know what that's like, the exact same thing happened to me about 3 months ago. I still haven't done anything about it, although I miss the music I had on that HD...

That is both lucky and unlucky....

Any links to RAID? How you use it, what yozu need to use it and stuff like that?
Very very mucb appreciateD!

RAID -> Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

Equipment= 2 or more hard drives the same size plus a RAID controller, either built into your Motherboard or as a separate card. Cheapest I have seen the cards is about $70US.

The way RAID works is spread your data over multiple disks in different ways depending on the RAID level.

The three main levels are as follows:
Level 0 Requires 2 drives
This level has no data security; it takes your data and stripes it across two drives. If one drive fails you loose all your data. It runs almost twice as fast a one single hard drive.

Level 1 Requires 2 drives
Total data security. Data is mirrored across two drives. If one fails the other has a complete copy of all the data so you loose nothing. Writes slowly and reads quickly (has to write data to two disk but can then read from two disks at once)

Level 5 Requires 3 drives minimum
Considered the best compromise. Offers data security and increased performance. Uses a parity "bit" to store info about the data on your drives. If one drive fails you can replace it with another and it will rebuild the data using the parity bits that are spread across the other drives. You can even operate the computer with one drive missing but you have no data security and you suffer a performance hit.

This is what I'm using with 3pcs 80GB 8MB cache Western Digital drives; they cost about $75 US each. These drives have a three year warranty unlike most other drives that have a year or less.
The RAID card I have is the Promise fastTrack SX4000 with 256 MB of ECC DIMM cache. The card was about $150US and the RAM $40. It will handle up to 4 drives.

There are several other RAID levels including a RAID 0+1 which requires four drives and a RAID 55 which requires 6 drives I think.

The drives in the RAID show up as one drive under windows which you can then partition and format normally.