Minette and I left Auckland on the 26th of March for a three week vacation to Wellington and the South Island. Late on the night of that very same day the hard drive on msqr.us died. Thus msqr.us has been dead for a few weeks. I guess I'm not too bad off since after the last time the hard drive crashed on msqr.us I implemented some more stringent backup procedures... but @#&^$!! what are the chances of that? It's been less than 2 years since the last drive failure. At least the last drive had the decency to fail after I got back from vacation.
Computers can be so damn lame.
Welcome back...
Being a Mac, I assume it's a SCSI HDD?
Was there a power outage? I lose anywhere from 5 to 10 drives whenever my techs have to power down my SCSI RAID arrays at work... SCSI HDD motors don't have the torque to spin up and down, especially the 15k RPM HDD motors.
Most HDD's have 1.2 million hour MTBFs and 5-year warranties, so your drive may have been covered... May pay to check.
Its a Compaq Presario X1000 laptop, so it's a 2.5" 5400 RPM IDE drive. I'd have to check to see what the warranty might be, but it probably isn't worth it since I got it in the US. There wasn't a power outage -- if there was, the laptop battery would kick in anyway -- and the drive is spinning 100% of the time.
Now I'm thinking of building my own box, which would use many laptop-like components to make it very quiet and power efficient but use a more sturdy hard drive configuration.
Come to the dark side and go PC.....muahahahaha :)
I'm already on the dark side then because it is a PC. Its running Linux for the OS, however. If you mean run Windows on it... goodness no, never!
What are you thinking of doing? Hardware RAID 1 with a couple of disks? That's your cheapest bet for added reliability and you almost double your read speed (no increase to write speed, but it's a small web server, no big deal)
IDE drives get sketchy when they get used over that 40 hours per week... If you want cheap, big, and pretty reliable, at least go SATA, though SCSI is your best bet for tested reliability... If you do go with SCSI, you'll be limited size-wise... 147 GB is the largest feasible SCSI drive, so far... 300 GB SCSI drives are just too expensive, unless you don't mind tossing $7-800 at a HDD...
Have fun, and let me know if you want help in your config.
Well I'm first and foremost concerned with noise and power consumption. The former because the server sits in the office where I work and the latter because I dislike the idea of having some heavyweight computer sucking up power like there's no tomorrow. This website details a lot of good info about quiet machine components and this one has good info about building small boxes.
In the end I'd probably go for software RAID, unless there is some hardware solution that doesn't take up much space and can work with Linux. Performance is not my main concern, so I can live without RAID as long as I have a good backup system in place (like my current system of backing up to an external FireWire drive nightly). And size is not really a concern, either. I've lived with a single 60 GB drive for the life of msqr.us thusfar, and am not hurting for disk space yet. I could always add something on like the G-RAID box.