Venetsian Jakimov

Entrepreneur, Website Developer and SEO Expert

The importance of File Server Mirror RAID hard drives

I just posted below that I‘m so stuck with work, and guess what happened on top of everything? Our DELL PowerEdge Server almost blew out and one of the hard drives with our most important information failed. Thanks GOD we had Mirror RAID on it and we didn‘t lose any information. Actually that MIRROR saved my ass and it showed how important and life saving this small investment can me in times of trouble.

Now I normally won‘t go with Mirror RAID since it requires two hard drives to operate as one - in our case we have 2 x 120GB that work with 120GB, but in this case one is the mirror of the other and when one fails the other one continues to work without even notifying you that a problem occurred. Actually yes in my case our Windows Server 2003 is so out of date that it didn‘t even notified me that one of the hard drives failed and this kind‘a sucked, but I know its my fault since I didn‘t monitor it recently....

Also the practice of making off-site backups is really valuable in case when you have critical data as we have and again due to my negligence we don‘t have fresh backup. The last backup I did was on March or May and if we didn‘t have that Mirror we woul‘d have lost all that information and its way to high price to pay in case of hard drive failure.

So what‘s the conclusion? Don‘t try to save on raid for your servers or you‘ll suffer greatly. Now the best thing I‘d say is that yep, I was smart on that one and I guess that‘s the best thing I did for our company that I‘ve invested a bit more, but now I‘m on the safe side and all my data is here! The only thing I can suggest now is that you people do backups every week and don‘t cry that you‘ve waisted one hour a week since this can safe your life in critical moments like these.