So you’ve bought a new digital camera and have been snapping away pictures of the kids, mom and dad, uncle Bob and so forth for the last few months (or years…).  In fact you now have a nice collection of photograph on your PC that you intend to keep for a lifetime of memories (do I hear violins?).  And to make sure you can always find them you’ve spent a considerable amount of time laying out the directories and subdirectories on your PC (maybe by year, month and date.)  You may even have also purchased a keywording software so that you can easily find pictures of your daughter by simply typing in her name.  So all is nice and dandy until one morning, when you go to turn on your mighty computer, you get this error (or something similar):  Fatal Hard Drive Error…  And nothing else…  At first you naively believe that a simple turn it off / turn it on again will solve the problem but not this time…  So you try a few other tricks but to no avail…  What has just happened is a complete hard drive failure.  And as you slowly realize this, your thoughts turn to all your family pictures that you may now have just lost.

Before this happens and you end up paying several hundreds of dollars on a data retrieval company to POSSIBLY recover your precious pictures, let’s try and be proactive and implement a very simple solution onto your PC that will save the day (or at least your pictures…).  Actually several solution are possible but I like this one because it doesn’t involve having to remember backing up your data every so often (and you know how these failures ALWAYS happen right BEFORE you got to do the backup…) The solution is called a RAID drive.  RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.  (If you want to know more about the technical aspect of this type of drive system see this article.)  Setting up a RAID 1 drive is relatively simple and involves purchasing a RAID controller (if your PC’s motherboard doesn’t already have one) and a second (identical in size) hard drive to the one you are presently using on your PC.  If you are completely computer illiterate when it comes to setting up computer hardware I’m sure you have someone in your entourage that can help you in setting up a RAID 1 array.

What this second drive does is to introduce redundancy in the critical component of your photo storage scheme (that’s the engineer in me talking…). You now have two drives mirroring each other i.e. they are exact copies of each other. And this mirroring is going on constantly so you don’t have to be thinking of backups all the time.  To your PC the Raid 1 drive looks like only one drive but in reality it’s a set of two identical drives.  Your system is now much more robust, in fact you could pull out one of the two drives at any time and your PC would still keep running.  Therefore in the above scenario where you loose a drive to some sort of hardware failure the RAID controller will simply advise you that you have lost data redundancy and that you should repair the defective drive (which you should do as quickly as possible…)

A RAID drive also introduces other possibilities for even further protecting your pictures and making your PC even more robust but I’ll get into that in a later post…