RAID10 Saved The Day

Reliable DBA Services is one of the things I talk about on my business website at http://StedmanSolutions.com, but that can mean many things to different people. To me this has many meanings. Today the reliability of having RAID10 on my home office computer saved the day.

Drive Failure Last Year

A year ago not long after starting working at Stedman Solutions, LLC full time, I had a drive failure, on the boot drive on my home office computer. I lost my entire C: drive, fortunately I had things backed up but it did cost me about 2 days of work while I was replacing drives, reinstalling the OS, reinstalling all my applications, and restoring things from backup. At that point I decided NEVER AGAIN will I allow that to happen.

Sure I had my laptop, but I didn’t have everything I need to do my work on the laptop.

After that I ended up building out another home office computer with the goal of having everything overly redundant. My c: boot drive is now RAID10 with 4 SSD’s, and my data drive is made up of 3 drives using the Two-way mirror feature of Windows Storage spaces.

Drive Failure Today

Today one of the SSD drives in my RAID10 c: drive configuration failed. No big deal, just a few minutes of working time lost. First after a reboot, I was able to get the failed drive to rebuild, that will hold me for a few days. Then I spent 10 minutes to go to Amazon.com and order a replacement drive, and a second one to have as a spare. Total elapsed time today 10 minutes. In 2 days when the new drives arrive, it will take me another 10 minutes to shut down my computer, replace the failed drive, start up the computer and then start the rebuild process.

Savings

Totals savings by having the RAID10 boot drive, about 16 billable hours, and headaches.  Total cost, for the RAID controller and SSDs about $600 plus replacements another $190. Peace of mind having RAID10 priceless.

All this and I didn’t even mention the performance benefits with RAID10.

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