Disks Do Fail

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After all, disks do fail. When an important one fails, IT has to scramble to replace it, while trying desperately to recover some, if not all, of the data, and this scenario plays out far more often than some manufacturers would like you to believe. A survey by San Jose-based Survey.com of 1293 IT staff and business executives, for example, revealed that the majority had experienced computer downtime in the previous year due to disk drive failure, and 30.3 percent of the time the computer was down for more than 24 hours. In addition to impacting IT staff and employees, one third of respondents said that these failures shut out customers. Thus, as well as the cost of the disk and labor, one must also factor in lost user time and the amount of business lost when customers are impacted by the failure. This survey discovered that most system administrators managed up to 500 disks on their Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers. The main actions performed to manage and protect data on the hard drive are backup, defragmentation, and hard drive replacement. When asked for the top problem with disks, most system administrators said drive failure and crashes, followed by running out of disk space.

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