Wonder of technology

One of a continuing series.

When I built my new PC, I set it up with RAID-1 because, being a writer and all, I'm amazingly paranoid about my data but don't want to run full backups every night.

I had to go through this long and annoying process to set it up which involved me having to buy and install a floppy drive (which I suspect is the only time I'll ever use it), but it worked fine and I was happy.

Until one day, Windows gave me this weird message on startup ("Installing new hardware... found Seagate... found Seagate...") and then both drives started showing up. For a week I didn't notice that somehow, the array had been split and one of the drives wasn't working until today. I went to fix it, which was long and annoying, and when I got it up and going, it rebuilt itself off the older drive, so I lost a week of data (fortunately, I didn't do anything really interesting this week).

I don't mind tinkering with boxes. I've done it most of my life. It's tedious and annoying, but I understand that when you want to do cool, non-standard stuff, you end up getting into loading drivers and reading manuals. I'm okay with that.

But once working, can't it stay working for a week? Is that really too high a standard before everything -- without explanation or any kind of chance to troubleshoot -- blows up on me?

Argh.