Tech Talk

Redundant Hard Drives

We have learned a lot in over 20 years of networking computers together. If you are thinking about hosting or you need a server for your business there are many things to consider. We have all heard of the weak link in the chain. Make sure you look after the weak link that will cause you the biggest problem.

A web server has to come as close to 100% uptime as possible. You wouldn't buy a bicycle with one wheel and you should not have a web server with one hard drive. Server drives take a real beating with people all over the world making demands on the machine. Drives do fail, as we all know.

A power supply or even a main board can be changed in five minutes. In fact, we can change them in three minutes. But just think about how long it takes to get all your data back and all your programs configured again after a hard drive failure or change. Even after you restore it from tape it takes days to get things back just as they were! There's all those scripts and files that you have to deal with all over again, setting permissions and checking all the paths. Then of course Windows locks a lot of files so they don't backup or restore correctly so it's time to install the software over again. Are all of your customers going to stay with you while you get your server going again?

Redundant drives solve this problem. If a hard drive fails the machine keeps running. A new hard drive is installed and the intelligent controllers we use rebuild the drive array in the background while the machine is up and running. Your customers and visitors to your site won't know that you had a hard drive failure. You lose no data and have no downtime. Never accept a server with a single drive.