I don’t think there will be that much punishments for going offline. David stated somewhere that people who go online with their laptop for 30 min. should be able to Farm a little Safecoin.
You can set them up in a non-RAID-ed configuration (4 separate disks and with a separate file system on each).
I think most people won’t. Non-persistent vaults will only be online as long as RAM and HD are okay. How many times a month or year do you loose data on your own computer? I think my computer runs about 13 hours a day. So when the network is live, and I want to earn some Safecoin, I’ll just run a Vault for these hours. If my computer goes offline for what reason, no problem. It only takes my rank down a bit.
This is a security and simplicity proposition. There will be persistent data via archive nodes in due course. I continually strive to ensure we reduce account info and ensure all people get a chance to farm on even the smallest devices. This also means you do not have a persistent vault ID and it’s re calculated at every reboot. It has very interesting implications and will move data much faster across the network. To be persistent we had to store the vault private key locally (there are some options). This way there is nothing/nada to steal from your computer that is going to help any attacker. So it is pretty nice in many ways.
In essence it allows much smaller fast/off/on nodes to take part in the network easily. As a vault stays on longer it holds data for a while and grows rank (automatically) per session. It makes rank calculation very simple and also makes ‘gaming’ the system significantly harder (it was already very hard).