please recommend a hardware raid pci card

In article ,
Maxim S. Shatskih wrote:
This is pretty reasonable for, for instance, a laptop -- where, think about
it, you have a giant honking battery attached with plenty of warning of
battery failure

Exactly. That's why laptop vendors like Asus preload WinXP on a FAT32 volume.
FAT32 is faster, and the NTFS's log-based fault tolerance is hardly needed with
this "giant honking battery".

was on a UPS, had write caching enabled (that this is the *default* for
every IDE disk I've ever seen is definitely *not* sensible, but that's a
different issue). Then of course NTFS cannot protect you, because the

Surely, but how often did this occur in practice? I worked in an office with
bad power lines once, the power drops were around once per 3 days. We never had
a ruined NTFS volume neither in servers nor in ~50 desktops.

Maybe this was too ancient times and IDE disks had no write cache that times?
This was 96-97, the disks were around 1GB and usually Fujitsu (due to
friendship with Fujitsu dealer).

Your intuition that 1GB IDE disks didn't have many megabytes of
enabled-by-default write cache is, pretty much, correct.

Using disks with large write caches (that lie about whether writes are
in fact committed to stable storage) in enclosures that don't require
Dire Measures to remove power without explicitly writing-back the disk's
cache is just begging for trouble. I repeat: I've seen _many_ Windows
servers in the field suffer major filesystem damage this way, even
servers where it was "okay" to use write caching because the servers
were "on a UPS". Like I said, the UPS doesn't protect you from the idiot
administrator who knows that his UPS and his RAID make his data "safe"
and who proceeds to hit the power switch on the front of the machine or
yank out the power cord.

Thor
--
Thor Lancelot Simon
But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp! You towel! You
plate!" and so on. --Sigmund Freud