Product Review

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IDE Raid Controllers
(Failing Hard Drive)

The question is not "if" but "when."  You may be thinking "what a weird way to open an article."  Well you'd be thinking correctly.  But the question still remains.  Let me fill in the blanks for you.  It is not "if" your hard drive will fail on you, but "when" will it fail on you.  In the last 5 months I've had a total of 3 hard drives just up and fail on various computers.  All were between 12 and 18 months old.  YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL FAIL!!  Are you ready to recover when it does? 

It seems that everyone has a solution.  "Just get a Zip drive," "Buy a CDRW for your computer," "Get a tape drive," all are common solutions for the impending doom.  Frankly having just lost my server's 30 gig hard drive, all of those options have huge gaping holes.

First of all you need to identify your individual "need."  As all my data is stored on my server including all my time billing, email, and accounting, it is the single most important computer in the office.  Unfortunately it was the last on the list for upgrades and cleanings.  Not anymore.  Your situation may be very different.  You may not have ANY critical data except your emails and some documents.  If that is the case, than a Zip drive or CDRW is a great option.  If you are somewhere in the middle, where you have important data, but it is not the single most important computer in your office, the tape drive is a good fit.  Lastly, if you are in my category, you really need to think things through.

I really thought that I'd be all set with my 30 gig tape drive matching my 30 gig hard drive, and for the most part I was.  I'm very careful to make sure that the tapes are changed everyday and that they are actually backing stuff up every night.  What I had not thought of was the time it takes to get the basic operating system back up and going to be able to restore from tape.  Three days later and several calls to tech support for my Amicus time management software, I was up and running.  If I had to pay for the technical services to recover from such a crash, it would have run at least $2000+.

Here is where the product review comes in to play.  All of that could have be avoided by installing a simple RAID controller and a second hard drive.  For my IDE drive system a RAID controller costs $49 at www.TigerDirect.com and a second drive was $85. 

Now let me explain what RAID does for you.  It keeps a "Real Time" backup of your hard drive AUTOMATICALLY.  It is like a mirror image of everything, always up to date.  The best part of the system is that YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING!  It is always working in the background for you keeping each drive synchronized in case of a failure.  When a hard drive crash occurs on a RAID equipped system, you only need to remove the failed drive and restart your computer.  You are back up and going as if nothing happened. 

There are several levels of RAID protection and a bunch of additional features that I'm just not going to go into right now.  Just suffice it to say that RAID it GOOD.  I still use my tape drive in conjunction with the RAID system as a backup in case both drives fail or there is a catastrophic problem with the server that cannot be salvaged.  I keep the tapes in a fire proof safe for example.  As my budget allows I plan to implement RAID on all my critical computers in the office.  It is much cheaper than a tape drive and hard drives are just getting cheaper and cheaper by the day.

If you have any questions about how to best protect your data from a hardware failure, please feel free to contact us.  Hope this has helped.