Teare Software Solutions

Hard Drive Failure Rates

I mentioned yesterday that relying on a server with no redundancy was keeping me up at night. Our server is about to enter its second year and it has only 1 hard disk with no RAID. The diagram below shows why this is such a big deal:

This chart was created by Nate Anderson in his paper [Experts: No cure in sight for unpredictable hard drive loss](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070225-8917.html). The chart is based on data from those who know a lot about data farms: Google. Needless to say, having an 8 percent chance of a drive failure happen **this year** was simply too great a risk for us to live with. Especially since the cost of a week offline would cover the yearly cost of a new server. The new server from 1&1 has RAID level 1, meaning each drive is a true mirror of the other. If one dies, the other one takes over and someone at 1&1 gets an email telling them to replace a drive. Needless to say, I will be sleeping better once the new server is in place!

New 1&1 Root Servers

It has been over 18 months since we bought our first server from [1&1](http://1and1.com) to power [our business](http://agilewebsolutions.com). The server has held up through several [Digg](http://digg.com) effects, a [Zotting](http://maczot.com), and even a [Heist](http://macheist.com). All-in-all, I've been quite pleased with the price and quality of the 1&1 root servers. Now, however, it is time to move on. The machine was not a peak performer when we "bought" it, and disk space has been depleted to near emergency levels. Since the server runs several businesses, the fact it doesn't have RAID has been keeping us up at night. Luckily, 1&1 has just released a set of new Root Servers that you can buy:

We decided to go with option #2, and will slowly move all our websites to it, and retire the old machine. We should be able to sell quite a few copies of our [Mac Password Manager](http://1passwd.com) with 3 terabytes of monthly transfer :^)