RAID--quick, cheap, good/fast, pick all 3

[jj at lcs.mit.edu (John Jannotti)]

Thanks, I thought that was a great post.  One of the reasons I've never
bothered with raid is a stupid practical concern.  I've always wondered how
you notice if a disk fails.  I guess this is a simple matter of a cron job
that looks for errors of some type, somewhere and mails you... but the
"some"s in that sentence bug me a bit.

Also, it's relatively easy to convince yourself that your backup scheme is
working if you use some sort of external media (even if that's just another
drive that you rsync to).  I'm less "sure" that things will go smoothly
when a drive fails.  Any comforting experiences?  Will you try unplugging
one drive while running your new setup and seeing how easy it is to deal
with the consequences? :)

I get nervous about a solution that works "so well" it makes it hard to see
what's going on underneath.

  jj