I suppose it’s a bit misleading to call the least bad something the “best.” This past weekend, I experience a harddrive failure–a 2-year-old WD RE2 0.5TB drive failed before its 5-year warranty was up and well before its MTBF (1.2 million hours = 136.895463 years). It’s been a while since I had a drive fail on me (excepting the hanging behavior of the 1.5TB Seagate drives, which isn’t really failure), but I’ve had plenty of drives fail over the course of 25 years of computing. With the luckier failures, I didn’t lose anything important.
What’s noteworthy about this failure, though, is that it’s the first time I’ve had a drive fail and lost absolutely nothing. The drive was half of a software RAID1 setup. OS X’s Disk Utility showed the drive with SMART status “failing” and showed the RAID as “degraded” but was still able to make a complete copy of the RAID to another drive. Even supposing the RAID hadn’t survived, all of my data except possibly the most recent hour is backed up to yet another drive via Time Machine.
I’m not going to claim the system is bulletproof (I’m sure it isn’t), but it is nice to see a redundancy/backup plan actually work when tested by the real world. I’m just waiting on a cross-shipped replacement from WD to rebuild the RAID.
Remember: it’s not if your harddrive fails, it’s when your harddrive fails. Drive failure is inevitable.
Edit: The replacement from WD was shipped next-day air, so I’ll have the new drive tomorrow. First business day to process the RMA, second business day to ship the replacement, and the replacement arrives on the third business day. Pretty fast.
