After the shear terror I just went through I felt impelled to remind fellow simmers to make back-ups of their most precious addons.I had what you might call "the perfect storm". Within 1 month I had not one, not two, but three hard disk failures! Now I make backups but come-on, hard disks were dropping faster than I could re-install them. Granted two of them were in the 4-5 year old range but one was only 16months old (and of course just out of wrranty). Two years of work d/l, collecting, purchasing, tweaking down the drain. And one of those drives was of course my FS drive and backups. Luckily, the FS Gawds were favoring me as after two days of tinkering I was able to get MS to at least read the drive again and re-index. I think they said "We'll give you one more chance to get your act together and save your data properly".So I immediately went out and bought a new hard disk and a new external DVD Dual Layer drive and a stack of disks to make additional backups. I have spent some 27 hours of coping FS folders (150GB) sloooooly onto the new drive then I will be making a partician backup AND DVD backups as a 3rd line of defense.Yes many hours of work but still better than the months it would have taken to rebuild from scratch. Whew!Just a word of warning to go check your backup status right now. Do you feel comfortable should you have a major crash today?

I can relate. A few years ago I was operating a RAID array with IBM HDs. The IBM's could not operate at the speed of the RAID controller. Every two to three month I was loosing a disk. I was going crazy. And while you can sometimes save corrupt data if it is on one disk a RAID0 array is a lot more vulnerable. I do not say you cannot run a reliable RAID0 array but in my case it was a pure gamble. And with my addon packed setup an FS reinstall is a pain. Today I am very cautious and write an image of my FS installation every 2 month or so. I have bought a 300GB disk only for this. Needless to say that I never bothered to build another RAID array. Alex

I am considering building a 2-hard drive system, but NOT a RAID0!!Disk1 would be a 74 gig 10000 rpm Raptor to hold the OS, swap, and FS.Disk2 would be a 250 gig 7200 rpm to hold a *GHOST* image of the 74 gig drive + mp3 + scenery + whatever else