Thanks for the excellent article on RAID. I understand the prinipals now, but you can anyone explain to me about how things work in practice w.r.t. mirroring?

I have a small business that basically runs off a hard drive. Every transation, email, and software tool I use are on this one drive.

Let's say I move this data to a system with two RAID mirrored drives. Now each write goes to both drives, each drive is a mirror of the other. I'm with you so far.

Now one of the drives malfunctions, gets bad blocks, or some other intermidant fault. How do I know that any thing has happened? How do I know which drive is bad? Do I just replace the bad drive with a new blank drive and expect the RAID system to make a mirror of the good drive on the new one?

I guess I'd like to hear how mirrored are used in practice. I know I really need to use them in my business.

thanks

Jim