When Hard Drives Fail

I recently had to deal with a couple of hard drive failures, something that we rarely encounter these days. The first instance occurred while I was at away at a conference. After conferring with my client we decided that he could get by with a second computer until I returned. Upon arriving at my client's office I was prepared to salvage my client's data and get a temporary hard drive up and running until HP could replace the defective unit.

When I opened the case I immediately remembered that we had ordered an HP computer with a RAID 1 mirrored hard drive setup. Simply stated, RAID 1 has two identical hard drives running side by side and if one drive fails the second drive continues operating as if nothing had happened until a replacement for the failed drive can be installed. In this situation, the computer wouldn't start as expected, so I disconnected the failed drive, rebooted the computer and the system started up with no loss of data. The total time to get the client back in operation - about three minutes. Now HP could come in, replace the bad hard drive and I could then rebuild the RAID afterwards.

As I thought about this incident I realized that certain clients should, because of their particular circumstances, have a RAID 1 setup in place because they simply cannot be without thier computers. Even though we have measures in place to protect their data, we need to discuss additional measures that can provide rapid recovery from an unexpected computer failure. Just as we employ multiple layers of protection from viruses, spyware and other malware, we can provide a layered approach that can handle hard drive failures. Another tool at our disposal is the use of imaging solutions that let us take a complete "picture" of a hard drive and restore that image to a new hard drive in a few minutes.

Every layer of protection has a cost associated with it, but as a business owner you must weight the cost of the solution against the cost of downtime. By carefully assessing the most critical computers in your business you can create a stategy for minimizing downtime. Unless you place no value whatsoever on what you do to earn a profit, the cost of a properly designed hardware uptime stategy will likely be recovered if and when you experience the first major failure. It is a specialized insurance policy, focused on keeping you in business. And that is part of an overal business continuity plan.

The second incident was a lot closer to home. It involved my primary computer. I had been experiencing a few random startup issues that led me to believe that I might have a faulty memory module on my motherboard. For safety's sake, before I left for the conference I backed up my e-mail account. My operating system and programs were on one hard drive while my data was stored on a second hard drive, which I also backed up. When I returned I decided that I would make some time two days later to replace my aging system with a new one that I had ready to go on my workbench. Enter Mr. Murphy and his famous law. Within an hour of making that decision my primary hard drive experienced a catastrophic failure. But I wasn't really concerned because I was backed up and the new system would be ready with minimal downtime ... or so I thought.

Despite the fact that we can recover data from failed hard drives in many cases, the damage to this hard drive was unrecoverable. And once I discovered that fact I also discovered that I had inadvertently backed my e-mail data up to a default location on the primary hard drive instead of to the second hard drive that held my data. The bottom line was the loss of a lot of e-mail. It wasn't catastrophic, but it was rather inconvenient. So I decided to employ the lesson that I learned from my client's situation and I took the time to rebuild the computer with a RAID 1 setup. I am also using imaging software as a secondary line of defense. So, as we are so fond of saying in this business, I am eating my own dog food by doing exactly what I will advise certain clients to do going forward. And that is a very good thing.