Hard Drive Failures are unevitable

We maintain at least 2 hard drives on each of our servers. The first drive contains the host files, databases and emails while the second drive is reserved to store backup files that are automatically generated every end of the week and end of the month.

These hard drives started working from the day they were deployed to us by our Data Center. As such, the older the server gets, the higher the probability that they might fail. We have servers with hard drives lasting for 5 years without any problem. However, it was unfortunate that one of our newer servers had a hard drive failure on the main drive which caused a couple of days of down time.

When this problem happens, we cannot avoid them the same way the HDD manufacturers (we use Seagate and Western Digital HDD) cannot guarantee us 100% reliable drives. The best we can do is make sure we have backups we can use to restore accounts and move on.

December 22nd, 2008