Renegade: flash-based SSDs made these years will probably outlast harddrives, since they aren't prone to mechanical failures, the amount of erase-cycles have been greatly improved, and there's internal wear-leveling algorithms in use as well. Thing with current SSDs is that while their random seek performance is super++, reads and especially writes are still
relatively slow, unless you go for the top-of-the-line and sell your kidneys.
Also note that you should use
physical drives, not just partitions on the same drive.
And (somebody please link the old thread
), I would really recommend that you go for one fast system+apps drive (raptor is a good bet), and then chain 2 drives to a RAID MIRROR. Mouser's 3-drive suggestion won't really help you if your data drive crashes, a mirror will (yeah sure, you should be doing automated backups, but if you only do that once per day, you can lose up to 23 hours of work if your data drive crashes. And what if it crashes during a backup? in-con-sis-ten-cy).
Personally I have 2x74gig raptor drives in my box, and a 400gig mirror on a fileserver on a gigabit LAN; too bad windows filesharing is so slow (expect to get 25-30megabyte/sec top, even though the LAN can easily go 90+ meg/s), but it's a lot of peace of mind this way, especially since my bulk storage is separated from my main box.
If I didn't have a fileserver, I'd have gone for one or two raptors, and a raid mirror in my own box. Perhaps external firewire or eSATA case as well, but I don't feel that I need that with my fileserver and all.
And oh, RAID isn't a replacement for backups, it's just a safeguard from
when your drive dies from mechanical wear and tear.
