I'm getting a decommissioned HP Compaq 7900 SFF desktop (C2D) from a school district donated to a nonprofit. This has an 80GB SATA HDD, and I will be putting a second identical drive in, pulled from another 7900 that is going to ewaste anyway. (Yes, this public CA school has too much money in the tech department, according to plenty of the techs, me included.)
Do you guys recommend putting the drives in RAID 1, or not using RAID at all? My thoughts:
Pros:
If one drive dies, the machine still boots. This is all from ~2009 and I don't want failure issues.
Cons:
If the mobo fails, can I recover data if I place one drive in another machine without the RAID controller?
Depending on how many machines they get, I may want to build a Windows image, sysprep it, and deploy it to make my life a little easier. Will this work with RAID? We've also got laptops that only have a single drive and hence will not be using RAID. Same age, pretty much the same chipset, similar specs.