Re: A cautionary tale

[Steve Morgan <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim,

Ooh, that's seriously bad luck :-(

Most of my WHS storage is in external USB hard drives. I suppose the
trade-off for multiple single points of failure, reduced performance and
increased power consumption is that at least every one of them has it's
own PSU.

Maybe USB drives have their place after all?

That said, there's still a strong case for off-site backups. Shame many
of us are too lazy (myself, primarily)!

Cheers,
Steve

On 09/05/2010 10:11, Tim wrote:
> Hi,
> I came downstairs yesterday to the smell of cooking - not bacon, but
the PSU in my main office PC.  Antec silent PSU had gone to a better place.
 After much swearing etc. I pulled it out and swapped the PSU for a spare -
still no joy, so I resigned myself to a new Mobo CPU and RAM (well every
cloud ...) and said outloud "Well the sodding computer is only a life
support system for the hard drives anyway".  All I really need is my
PST file from outlook and I can exist in limbo until the new bits arrive. 
Imagine my surprise when I put the HDD in a caddy and it was dead - Closer
inspection showed a burn in the motor controller chip - good job its backed
up on the other drive - ah, but the other drive showed the same signs of
having met an untimely demise. This puts me in quite a situation - All the
important stuff is backed up on WHS, but there was rather a lot of stuff
that whilst not being critical, was nice to have - it was reciprocally
backed up onto 2 separate drives, but
as both of those drives were in the same box and are now dead it means I
have probably lost the lot (I have ordered 2 identical drives and will try
replacing the controller boards to see if I can get them to play ball once
more - the longest of long shots I know....).
>
> BUT WHAT IF IT HAD BEEN MY WHS MACHINE? I have been putting rather a
lot of eggs in the "folder duplication" basket thinking it was
insuring me from drive failure, but if 2 drives can be smoked by a PSU
failure I'm not sitting quite as prettily as I first thought.  Is there
anything I can put between the drive and the PSU to isolate them.  Short of
having 2 WHS boxes, what do people think the solution might be?
>
> Bugger,
> Bugger,
> Bugger.
>
> Tim.
>
>





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