Buying a new server

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Posted by hbhb, 03-08-2010, 09:28 AM
Hello guys, I am wanting to get a new server, and I am thinking to get one with less hardware headache for a very long term purposes. Very frequent my server hard drive gone dead in 6-8 years life span and when that happen, sometimes they happen in a bad time, or backup was older, and it troubles me a lot to buy new hard drive, and resetup new server, control panel, restoring backup (all these take DAYS instead of hours!) So i wanted to find a perfect hardware solution that allows me to change my hard drive every 4 years, when slotted in, it 'rebuild' thru somekind of raid features. Since I am pretty new in hardware stuffs, anyone here can recommend me what is the best hardware solution?
Posted by SercoNetworks, 03-08-2010, 10:12 AM
All Hard Disk's fail eventually, the times varies between uses and/or stress on the disk. The best way to go is probably RAID plus using some-kind of 3rd party backup-software (Like TrueImage) just in-case the RAID has a problem.
Posted by skullbox, 03-08-2010, 10:36 AM
That might be more trouble than it's worth if you are using say 5-6 drives in your RAID setup. I go with RAID5 arrays in all my servers. I have some dell 2650s that are almost 8 years old now. I've had 1 drive fail, but because I had RAID5, I simply swapped it out and the array started rebuilding itself. The "rebuild" process you are looking at might not work well with a 5-6 drive setup. I never suggest pulling drives out of a RAID array unless they are already dead. I've destroyed the array before doing this... The other problem you would have by doing this is that you would need to have extra drives of the same model or at least the same disk size.
Posted by hbhb, 03-09-2010, 02:44 AM
Hi skullbox, 1. when u said u swap it out, does that means u pull out the drive in hotswap while the server is still running? 2. how do u know it's dead? any tools to find out? 3. after 8 yrs, it wouldn't be possible to look for drives at the same model (disk size would have gone very hi-tech). do u keep drives stock?

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