This always makes me smile, as when you look at the numbers, most enterprise hard drives have a higher failure rate than consumer grade
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This always makes me smile, as when you look at the numbers, most enterprise hard drives have a higher failure rate than consumer grade
WSWD
Well-known member
This always makes me smile, as when you look at the numbers, most enterprise hard drives have a higher failure rate than consumer grade
Of course they do, because they're in use 24/7, subjected to heavy use, etc. You can expect them to have a higher failure rate. When you actually compare the real numbers, i.e. the hours of use, non-enterprise drives fail far sooner and far more often. The enterprise drives are designed for higher heat tolerances, higher vibration tolerances, etc., and when you put a normal drive into a server environment, it just doesn't hold up.
The only test that puts the enterprise drives with a higher failure rate did not subject the drives to the exact same conditions, same data reads/writes, etc., which makes their study completely useless.
In my real world tests (almost 18.5 years in business), I have not had a single enterprise hard drive fail...ever. Not one! Generally speaking, the RAID cards break before the drives do. No joke.
Consumer drives, because the client is too cheap to pay for enterprise drives? Get failures regularly. I have boxes full of failed consumer drives that I take to the shooting range and blow apart.Same goes for ECC RAM and server-grade processors. The numbers will very likely point to the consumer-grade products as well, but once again, as soon as you throw them into a server environment, the consumer products just don't stand up. I have literally seen processors melt, because the whole motherboard and processor/heatsink just doesn't stand up in that environment, and with continuous 24/7 use.
It's all fun and games until you're dealing with a server crash because a consumer-grade motherboard, or hard drive, or non-ECC RAM or processor fails. Me personally? I spend the few extra bucks so my clients have a reliable platform.
TPerry
Well-known member
Had 2 Seagate Cheetah NS 10K drives fail in a Dell server a couple of years ago (the server is now sitting in my computer room as my test bed). Now it's sitting with 1 of the PS's apparently dead. Of course it IS a "few" years old.
Thats damn impressive! Lucky, but impressive!
WSWD
Well-known member
I'm definitely keeping my fingers crossed!! ha ha! It's the RAID card gods that have not been friendly. Averaging about 2-3 RAID cards a year.
I guess it just depends. I have never had a consumer drive fail in any of my personal home computers. One of them has been in daily use since the very early 2000's. But when I use consumer drives in servers, they inevitably fail. Even with that, I've been fairly lucky. I'd say maybe 4-5% have failed at the most, but that 5% compared to 0% is enough of a difference that I just don't want to risk it over a few dollars. When you run it out over 5 years or so, the cost of an enterprise drive is negligible...a few bucks a year at most. Why risk data and downtime over a few bucks a year??
rainmotorsports
Well-known member
I wonder how my original plan for this rig would have held up. I intended after a year to throw my gaming rig into a 2U rack and colocate locally as my web server. Instead I kept it and its been through 3 years of always on, 1.3 Ghz overclock, probably 10,000 hours of near full load. Of course the intention was to drop the overclock for server duty. Basically anytime I am not using it or gaming on it I have it encoding video or doing something else CPU intensive. Not sure how hot they keep these data centers but I beat my consumer grade cpu alot harder than I ever do my servers and I sweat up a storm in this room. But the plan was basically hey I have last years hardware, its "free".
Database servers would chew through hard drives in ways you would probably never see in a normal consumer application and I think thats where people would initially underestimate the need for an enterprise drive. ECC ram is not available in consumer applications partly to greed. They wouldn't want enterprise customers to be tempted into buying consumer grade hardware... oops
OverHere
Active member
Their back up was a disaster and they couldn't take the blame
What actually happened? Did you confirm the backup was working? They recommend doing a test restore, did you do that?
OverHere
Active member
Yes followed all their procedures, and nothing - they just don't have the back up expertise... Back up was one of the reasons I went to them first-off
So your test restore worked fine but when you came to use it another time it failed?
OverHere
Active member
no, the restore was in pieces, the site never functioned at any time. I m looking for a good host.
OverHere
Active member
Do stable host provide managed VPS? And custom names servers? What about back up?
Well do it without being defamatory to existing hosts that actually are very good.
Maybe it's a coincidence that you had a bad experience with two highly reputable hosts in a row. It's at the very least unlucky. Or maybe the root cause is closer to home.
But, certainly, it's unnecessary for you to keep labouring the same point over and over.
Just focus your efforts on finding another good host. And I'm sure we all wish you a 3rd time lucky.
Maybe it's a coincidence that you had a bad experience with two highly reputable hosts in a row. It's at the very least unlucky. Or maybe the root cause is closer to home.
But, certainly, it's unnecessary for you to keep labouring the same point over and over.
Just focus your efforts on finding another good host. And I'm sure we all wish you a 3rd time lucky.
OverHere
Active member
There was no incident with KnowHost - they behaved unprofessionally over someone placing a trade marked content on a site, see http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=4be1ef31bb18907ebf3f57cbbc89322d&t=1362639&page=4 - as for Nimbus, I am simply replying to RobParker's questions.
OverHere
Active member
But, yes, you are right about me finding a 3rd host... thanks for the good luck!
So Nimbus recommend that you do a test restore to make sure everything is ok. You did that and found the backup didn't work. Rather than getting it fixed, you continued to let the broken backup run and then got into a situation where you needed the backup?
Is that a correct summary?
OverHere
Active member
No, I tried their back up action over several months, and each time it simply replaced the lost site with a string of patches which never let the site work properly... so I left./ I need a host who does a solid back up so I can just work on my website, this is more so the case as I have a ambitious website coming soon based on dating.
This makes zero sense....
TPerry
Well-known member
Actually... it sounds like he's talking about incremental backups? And further doesn't know how to go about restoring it.
Again, we get back to the point of "Your'e an idiot if you rely on your hosts backups" theory. If your data is that important to you, YOU (meaning the forum owner - not you @Slavik) should have implemented your OWN backup plan (and tested it). Failure to do so is actually just a failure on the forum owners part.
@OverHere's case appears to be lack of knowledge about how to run a VPS/server, lack of knowledge on how backups actually work, and lack of oversite of a forum owned by him, resulting in a large amount of spam.
I've got a feeling that any host he goes to is going to be problematic unless he want's to pay into the 4 digit figures per month for the "personal touch" he thinks should go with it.
oh that makes more sense...
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