Over 90 percent of all new information produced in the world is being stored on magnetic media, most of it on hard disk drives.

Critical data is often stored on a RAID system because the configurations are considered to be fault tolerant. RAID systems can be designed to keep working when one drive fails. Disks can be hot swapped while the system keeps running but even this setup of an array of drives is not infallible. It can only offset the failure of a single drive—and the chances of multiple drive failures occur more frequently than most want to imagine.

The conditions leading up to a hard drive failure are complicated and vary depending upon a variety of situations. To minimize simultaneous drive failures and subsequent data loss, it may help to mix up the manufacture dates and batch lots (listed on the drive label) when deploying multiple drives in a RAID array.

It also a good practice to check that all drive firmware is up to date and to have a hot swap spare drive assigned to the arrays for an automatic rebuild of a degraded array.

The bottom line is, all drives will eventually fail. No matter how new your hard drive is, or if your storage system is a RAID, there is always risk of data loss.

Our motto is “The best drive is a backed up drive.”