I Heart RAID

On Thursday afternoon, we had a critical situation in the Kratzer Household.


The computer was having problems and wouldn't start up. Jenn called me while I was out at lunch. I decided to leave work early because what she was describing didn't sound good.


I came home to find out that one of my disk drives was complete toast. Luckily, I made the decision to purchase a computer with a RAID controller on the motherboard. For those non-techies out there, a RAID controller allows me to make two disks look like one disk (among other configurations). This is called RAID 1 - or mirroring. Every time a piece of data is written to the disk drive, it is actually written to two disk drives. The beauty of this is that I always have a working image of my computer system (even if a drive dies).


This problem was easily fixed. I went to Best Buy (10 minute drive down the road), and found a similar disk drive (same size, same speed, same vendor even!). I installed the mounting kit and slid the new drive into the computer, removing the old drive.


When I booted the computer, the system told me that the RAID array was rebuilding itself and that it would start booting a while. After a slower boot into Windows, I was able to watch the drives "rebuild". Basically, the one good drive needed to copy all of its data to my new drive (to keep the system back in sync). This took about an hour and a half. After that, I was in tip-top shape.


When I purchased my computer three years ago, I made three conscious decisions:

+ I got the maximum amount of memory I could put in the computer at the time (4 GB). This has had a very good pay off for me in terms of performance.

+ I got a premium XPS system from Dell. Wow. I actually never opened up my computer until Thursday (I'm a software guy.. not a hardware guy). The case system was designed to open very easily (no screw drivers needed) and every component was easy to access. Thank you, Dell.

+ I invested some extra money for a RAID controller. I always knew this was a good decision. The events on Thursday proved it.


Someone once said "There are two types of disk drives. Those that have failed and those that are going to fail.". I can testify to this. I've had many computers over my time and I have had many disk failures. I knew that having RAID would "save my bacon".


And while I certainly have back-ups of everything, I am glad that this problem was fixed (with zero data loss) in a couple of hours. A re-installation and a copy of my data down from Amazon S3 would likely have taken days. And I'm sure that I would have forgotten to back up something.


Thank you, RAID.