What should I do

[TheTylerLee]

If your operating system is windows, you may need to delete system32.

[MagicManICT]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

A personal desktop doesn't need RAID 5. It just needs a good backup plan. If you're putting things on the computer of vital importance, I'd go with RAID 1 (needs two identical drives) or 0+1 (needs four identical drives) and still maintain a backup plan. Also, put everything you can't reinstall (photos, music, etc) on cloud services. If you're trying to run a business off your computer.... hire a tech consultant to set up and maintain a backup plan and design and set up a low cost RAID system.

But yeah, these guys are right about how "dead" is the drive. Anyone with a drive failure should follow borka's advice. It's amazing how much you can recover off your old hard drives.

[Nummy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

A personal desktop doesn't need RAID 5. It just needs a good backup plan. If you're putting things on the computer of vital importance, I'd go with RAID 1 (needs two identical drives) or 0+1 (needs four identical drives) and still maintain a backup plan. Also, put everything you can't reinstall (photos, music, etc) on cloud services. If you're trying to run a business off your computer.... hire a tech consultant to set up and maintain a backup plan and design and set up a low cost RAID system.

But yeah, these guys are right about how "dead" is the drive. Anyone with a drive failure should follow borka's advice. It's amazing how much you can recover off your old hard drives.

And why personal desktop shouldn't have raid 5? I have it. 2 of my disks died and both time I saved all data and still have better performance than normal disk. Problem?

[MagicManICT]

From a pure performance standpoint: You're not getting the improvements you think you are compared with other potential systems that can cost much less.

From a pure redundancy standpoint: There's better ways to secure your data

From a price standpoint: There's much, much cheaper solutions that are as or more reliable (need to account for operator error here, too)

But hey, if you have the money to burn for the hardware, go for it. Typical desktops have no need for it. I thought it was fun to do this 15 years ago when I did all my network tech training, but in the end, it was just an exercise in being able to do it, and not one in truly designing a system for an intended use.

[Nummy]

As performance it is still better than having only one disk, and worse than RAID 0. But I get redundancy where at RAID 0 I don't get.
Yes there are better ways to secure data, but not many ways to improve performance slightly when getting more security.
From price: 3 disks are expensive? You don't need to buy maximum size you see in store. If you today buy 3x 500GB it can be very cheap and you get 1TB out of space, which is also secured if one of disks fails.
From my view RAID 5 is the best solution for personal computers where people need secured data from disk fails and also wish to get some speed improvement. Today people buys SSD's which are much much smaller and much much more expensive just to get more reliable disk and ofcourse more speed.