Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to withstand a failure in its hardware. It is an integral, and even critical, component of scientific, business, and state systems.
It is not usually considered a significant concern on a personal basis for someone using a home computer due to the following reasons-
- Simple needs
A lay user of a personal computer has simple needs of being able to work (and play!) with a few stock applications and save a few personal (mostly media) files. Creating a complex RAID configured system to secure it would be an over-kill.
- Infrastructure costs
The costs involved in procuring the hardware and resources for a building and maintaining a solution to increase the fault tolerance can be very steep. This is unnecessary in the context of one home computer.
- Non-critical data
By large, it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that the data residing on a single home computer of an average user is non-critical. This doesn’t need a huge investment in resources to protect it from loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability.