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If I did not know better I'd swear that an HD Exciter is nothing more than a PC running on a single hard drive.
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That said, HD importers are computers and they contain hard drives. Hard drives can and do crash. Would it be smart to RAID them? Yeah, probably, but solid state drives would probably be smarter.
- In my general experience, hard drive failures are a rather minor source of computer lockups. They do happen, but a software crash is a far more common problem. Often, a crash of the Windows operating system itself (which is of course beyond the control of Harris/Nautel/BE/whoever) or of drivers. And yes, of the HD encoding/control software itself. (even the best-written software
will occasionally crash. They can't predict
everything that will happen.)
- Seems to me permanent storage of data is not that important in this application. Except for a few configuration files (which are easily backed up on a CD or USB memory stick) once the audio is broadcast you don't care if it's lost forever, and if it's lost
before it's broadcast, you really don't care if you can recover it later! I don't think RAID would provide much return on investment - the idea of a solid state drive is probably a lot better.
I suppose the right answer is a RAIC - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers - OK, I just coined that
Really, a second encoder computer, some switches, and a silence sensor. But with no revenue riding on HD yet, I can't see anyone spending the $$ at this point.
