I should have posted this last thursday, but in the Christmas rush, I havent found time until now…

Last week, I was at home working on my computer (creating a new version of notPopular.com actually) when my system froze. It was a bad kind of freeze. The kind of freeze where you know something major just went wrong.

I hit the power button to reboot. The bios posted with no problem. Then my raid controller came online…

CRITICAL ERROR: ONE OR MORE OF THE DISKS IN THE ARRAY HAS FAILED

Press esc to continue booting

HOLY CRAP! One of my drives died! THANK GOD for RAID

Side note on RAID:

RAID stands for: redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks

RAID is a data storage scheme using several hard drives to gain increased data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput or capacity compared to single drives.

There are many configurations of RAID to achieve different tasks. For me the best solution was "RAID 1" which is mirroring. Simply, one drive mirrors another. I had two identical drives in my computer but the computer would only see one, but any data stored, would be saved onto both drives. This allows my data to be redundant and fault tolerant in case oh say…. one of my drives fails; I have an exact copy of the data, and no down time.

ok ok ok, back to my story… OH CRAP! One of my drives died!

I was stunned, but I wasnt worried, that why I have backups and use RAID 1, for a situation just like this. In the last 13 years, I havent had drive just stop working. I always heard about it happening to people, but never me.

I booted into windows, and everything seemed the same, and it should, to windows I only had one drive, it didnt know about the hardware raid controller. Awesome, I didnt lose a single file. I immediately started to back up my files onto DVD and onto a larger external hard drive.

Long story short. If you build your own computer or are serious about securing your data get a raid controller and an extra hard drive. You can buy a really good RAID controller card for under $100. My high end motherboards now offer integrated RAID controllers.

I also have an external drive and use syncback, as recommended from lifehacker.com

BACKUPS ARE GOOD