joeware - never stop exploring... :)

As I have griped in the blog before I have had some serious issues with the 500GB Western Digital drives from a few years ago. This was about the time that the drive warranty changed dramatically (go figure – duh). In the last month I have had several more fail on me, 3 of them in one day and on another day had another one fail. Both times it took out portions of my virtual server host so I lost email access. The first time for about a week, the second for 3-4 days. That was annoying but I was on vacation for the first failure so I wasn’t in any rush to get it working again. The second time I felt pretty similar. 😉 Obviously if I felt stronger about it I would be paying someone to host my email instead of running it through a test server… a test virtual Exchange server at that. I am not too worried though, I use rollernet to mailbag my mail for me in the event my network or server decide to be uncooperative and so usually, not always, but usually, I get all my mail that was sent to me.

Anyway so much for the hundreds of thousands of hours of MTBF Western Digital rated those drives at… At best they went a little over 3 years.

To solve my issue once and for all, I ordered a bunch of 1TB Seagate Barracudas from NewEgg and have been putting those into my server and will be putting some into my main desktop as well (along with a 30GB OCX Vertex I purchased previously for the system disk). I am running a 30GB OCX Vertex in my server and I have never seen a server reboot so fast. It takes longer to POST than to boot and log me in and show me my complete desktop. Its seriously amazing.