Recently the main data drive in Hoyty.com has been dying a slow and painful death. It has never totally stopped working thankfully. It was having problems with high quantity access. Such as backing up an Exchange database to and from itself. It would time out and the controller card would throw a ton of errors.
I wasn't completely sure if it was drive or controller card and I wasn't in the mood to test it. Mostly becuase it has the only copy of lots of data that is sort of important to me.
What I decided to do was finally practice what I preach. I ordered two new Western Digital 250 GB SATA II hard drives and a High Point RocketRAID 1520 SATA RAID card. I thought about 400 GB drives, but they were older technology and almost twice as much. Also at this point I only have about 90 GB of data on the original 200 GB drive.
The drives aren't the fastest available, but they are a good mix of performance, heat and technology. Also the RAID card isn't the best, but it is SATA, does mirroring and was dirt cheap. I put the drives into a RAID 1 mirror. Then I moved everything from my 200 GB to the new array. Everything seems fine and I will take out the old one and see if I can figure out the problem.
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