Need replacement for older harddrive...

[Duke of Buckingham]

?DAD?. Where is ddubnmjuydyxpto or something. Can I call you daddy?

[Slicker]

I just raid 5 my drives so when 1 dies, I just replace it. Then I don't have to worry about much else. I still backup in case 2 drives failed at one (very unlikely) or some other disaster strikes

FYI, I had to replace two drives on a database server last week. Planning for just such an occurrance, the server was setup with RAID 5 and two hot spares. Unless they all go bad siimultaneously, it can handle 3 drive failures and still limp along. So, having two drives fail does happen. The questions is how much do you want to spend to mitigate the unlikely risk. For this server, the couple hundred dollars for hot spares was consisidered a good option when compared to the lawsuits we'd have if we lost our client's data. I'd probably never put hot spares in a machine at home, but my home office machines are all either RAID 5 or mirrored.

[DrPop]

@Slicker - wow, crazy, two drives at once. Yikes. How much better is RAID 5 than RAID 1? For my own (fairly small at this point) health care office that we run here, I just have our business data on a RAID 1 setup, mirrored across two "regular" 500GB drives. If I remember correctly, they are about 1 year old 7200rpm Seagate drives. I was thinking maybe I should replace them with two WDD Black drives, because those seem to have a better track record. Cost is a factor, of course, because we are not some big entity (yet?) but, do you think I need to take more precaution than this?
Thanks, because I value your opinion on this kind of stuff big time!

[Beerdrinker]

Well, I am taking the plunge and ordering one of the WD Black that DrPop suggested once my next paycheck comes in....I am gonna go "crazy" and ordering the 1TB version. That ougth to cover me for some time.....LOL!

[DrPop]

That's awesome Beer! I think that is one of the best HDDs that you could buy. The only one arguably better is the WDD RE4 model, which is built for Enterprise RAID solutions, but they are pretty spendy, and not much different than the Caviar Black edition, I think.

[Mike029]

That's awesome Beer! I think that is one of the best HDDs that you could buy. The only one arguably better is the WDD RE4 model, which is built for Enterprise RAID solutions, but they are pretty spendy, and not much different than the Caviar Black edition, I think.

+1

[Beerdrinker]

Thks for the feedback guys!!

1 x WD Black 1TB SATA600 64MB ordered!

With a little luck it arrives here tomorrow! The retailer got day-to-day delivery

[DrPop]

Oh, sweet, Beer! You're going to love that thing. Now, granted it's no SSD in the speed department, but with the light load (250GB or so) that you have to put on it now, it will be quite fast...and these things are supposed to be pretty reliable. No complaints with the one I've got here!

[c303a]

I am running 3 of the WD Caviar Black 1 TB drives and love them. They are all the 64 mb versions and I love them. They are about a year old now and no trouble at all. I also back up the entire computer to a 1 TB Fantom Drive external HD. I don't want to take the chance of loseing data.

[DAD]

?DAD?. Where is ddubnmjuydyxpto or something. Can I call you daddy?

You could call me daddy, but then you might be asked to do things you might not want to do