> That is the point that most people are dealing with today, and that Tom > keeps emphasizing. > > If the likelihood of a computer failure is close to the likelihood of a disk > drive failure, how do you minimize the risk?
That's the thing. In my experience, the system will fail many, many times less often than will a hard drive. All Tom has are throertetical numbers from drive mfrs to back up his claim. My real world experience shows a very different result. And you minimize the risk with backups, at least at the most basic level. > It used to be that disk drives failed ten or a hundred times more often than > computer systems. But now they are roughly equivalent - hard to determine > which is more likely in general. No, they aren't. Hard drives win the failure contest. Hands down. > So spending even $200 on a RAID controller and the same on extra disks just > for RAID, is probably not the best way to minimize risk to the small > business today. Who keeps extra drives around? I have 5 year warranties on my Dell servers and they have the parts. If I keep a system past the warranty, it's a non-mission critical system and there are scads of spare parts available. Again, this is balancing risk vs. cost vs. priorities. It's not a simple equation and every business is different, not to mention, every system. But you keep arguing with me as if I think replicated servers are a bad thing. I've made it very clear that they aren't, in fact they are quite valuable and I wish I had them. But, they are also very, very costly compared to a RAID array. What will give me a middle ground is a data replication system that will also have bare-metal images of servers that can be restored to a virtual machine if needed, with real-time data snapshots for critical systems. That still is $$$, but nothing close to the cost aand complexity of a replicated server environment. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
