Jim Henderson wrote:

> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:42:27 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> See my anecdotal evidence in reply to Stefan.  Two identical units, one
> powered on and off regularly, one that was left on 24x7.  Guess which one
> failed?  Not the one that has been turned on and off regularly for 5
> years now.  The one that was plugged in and running for 3 years solid.

Hmm... well, no contest there. I guess there can be other factors involved
besides on / off frequency then? My personal experience with server-grade
hardware I've worked with differs though. It does seem (at least in my
personal experience) that turning HDD's on and off less makes them last
longer. But as you say, anecdotal. :)
 
>> PS. I've yet to find a consumer RAID controller which actually works
>> properly. They all seem to be hopelessly unreliable. And most of them
>> are software RAID anyway; the controller is a normal IDE or SATA
>> controller, and the Windows driver does all the actual RAID functions in
>> software. It seems that only the £££ server-grade controllers actually
>> do the job properly.
> 
> Software raid exists for some platforms - and for mirroring for backup
> purposes, that's really all you need.  Heck, you could do it over iSCSI
> with a fast enough connection (I've seen that done as well).

I've written a simple cronjob which uses bash scripting and some
command-line PHP to automatically tar/7zip our primary server's vital sites
and databases once every 24 hours, and then FTPs that over to our over
server in a different datacenter automatically. Works fine too. The data
centers are about 10km away from each other.

That way we can lose only one day's worth of changes, which (cause we're
small!) usually isn't much. But I can see the point of some kind of "live"
solution if you do a TB a day or whatever.

-- 
Stefan Viljoen

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