Disk Drives Fail...

What can I say?   It is inevitable, just a matter of time really...   Disk drives Will fail at some point.

Tonight happened to be that night for one of my hard disks to punch it's magic MTBF number and kick the bucket...!

So - when it does happen - are you ready for it?   Is your precious data, your photos - going to be safe?   What steps have you taken to mitigate the risk of hard drive failure???

I'm actually in the middle of redesigning and significantly enlarging my entire data storage system design with an eye towards increasing and improving further future redundancy than I already have; but thanks to some forward planning years ago my data is safe because it's all currently protected with RAID 1.

If you don't know what RAID (Redundant Array of Independantly Disks) technology is and you're in the photographic industry - well all I can say is get googling quick and get your photos properly backed up...

So, after 10 hours to rebuild my primary drives RAID 1, I will be back to normal operations.  No stress, little fuss.

However my current system could be better, faster and simpler to operate and recover during a drive failure.   That's where my new RAID design, once implemented, will vastly improve on what I currently have implemented by providing increased redundancy, increased performance and increased capacity.