As mentioned above? a RAID 1 or 5 set up is a good idea for your critical stuff.

Also Consistent Power is Critical!!!


Check this out? I was losing a hard drive about every two weeks(regardless of brand) and I was really getting pissed.

Finally I realized how bad the power situation was in my new area. Hard drives are very sensitive to voltage and you should definitely invest in a Voltage Regulator. Older hard drives are not as sensitive it seems.

Most stuff in an office or house does not care what the voltage is like. Voltage can go up and down all day and you will never notice anything except for the occasional light flicker. What you can't see is thousands of micro-changes in voltage.

The worst is when the power goes off or a brownout (even for just a few seconds).

When that happens? everything on the line turns off (until it is turned back on by a human). But, if you have a battery backup on your machines they will stay on? and when the power comes back on? the line spikes (but not hard enough to throw your surge protector). Over time this kills a hard drive

Get an APC http://www.apc.com/

There are consumer level ones that cost between 150 and $300 for individual machines.

And business level units costing 300 and up

I opted for a 3000VA to cover 3 machines at my home office and everything hooked up to them http://70.85.180.209/home_office_rack.jpg

It was like $1500? a little bit of overkill? But I have not lost a hard drive in 2 years and I have not had the stress or downtime caused by a hard drive failure.

Forget hard drives, let's all go back to those punch card things.

Thats cause you are always dripping Uno Jizz into your computer...... :winkwink:

I have that same cable box... Did you hook up extra SATA hds to it?

You promised you wouldn't tell!

Nice setup, and this might be why my drives last a long time. :winkwink:

And use a backup freeware like Cobian Backup to automate it. The software will automatically backup all/any files/folders you want on your pc or server at any interval you want and will even zip/compress and encrypt the data if you want to.... and much more.

Nah I didn't bother... I rent that cable box from my local provider (BrightHouse) for like $10 a month. Its a pretty nice unit actually... Scientific Atlanta 8300HD.

I don't want to put any money into it since it's not mine.

like someone said on page1, MTBFs are like a decade now.. if you're killing hard disks left and right, check your power supply

That made my day :1orglaugh

Never get Fujitsu's!

A bad powersuply will deliver inconsistant power, and its just hard on the drives.

I use Seagates and only seagates for myself and the office, a total of 30ish drives, and there is usually one that goes down every year.
Usually the oldest one, some are 5-6 years old. All the maxtors and others have long died off, I havent had a maxtor last more then a year.

You could opt for a solid state drive, although the ones of any size thats usefull are expensive as hell.