Today's outage

[Sharky]

Thanks for the feedback and advice everyone. There are a bunch of improvements we can make like I said, it shouldn't take as long as it did, but thankfully we got everything back okay. Backups and redundancy is one of those things that we assume everything is setup and working, but rarely check to make sure it is. It's surprisingly easy, like Eric says, for a site to assume everything is working in the event of a failure, but get caught out when for whatever reason it's not and a bad situation can quickly turn catastrophic. I think in the whole history of T2W the primary hard disk failing has happened twice, so it's not something you tend to think about day to day. Of course, like new_trader says you should and there's no excuse for not having a complete solution in place.

 

[hhiusa]

You can buy a very basic RAID 0 for less than £250. You can buy brand new terabyte drives for under £50. Anyone who thinks a back-up system is sophisticated and expensive doesn’t have much experience with computer hardware and software. I ran a hobby business in my spare time which had complete redundancy and backup.

I can't believe a site like this could be offline for so long because of a simple hard drive failure. I thought it was a major network issue (like a cut fibre) or something out of the site owners control.

Computer stuff is dirt cheap, this isn't the 1950's.

I know! I have 2TB drives that cost $130.00. Information storage is pretty cheap nowadays. They even make 1TB flash drives now.

 

[metrader]

I was looking once for a flash drive for my laptop - they're much cheaper nowadays. I think they're faster than normal ones and don't suffer failures as often as spinning hard disks?

 

[hhiusa]

I was looking once for a flash drive for my laptop - they're much cheaper nowadays. I think they're faster than normal ones and don't suffer failures as often as spinning hard disks?

That is true. Spinning hard disks have moving parts hence the spinning hard disks. Anytime there is moving parts in something it is more prone to failure. Solid-state drives were a step up from that. Now Apple makes their computers with PCIe flash storage. Flash storage is like having a hard drive that's all RAM.

 

[metrader]

That is true. Spinning hard disks have moving parts hence the spinning hard disks. Anytime there is moving parts in something it is more prone to failure. Solid-state drives were a step up from that. Now Apple makes their computers with PCIe flash storage. Flash storage is like having a hard drive that's all RAM.

You can find internal 500 GB from $150 to $350. 1 TB from around $290

They call them SSD as you rightly pointed

http://www.amazon.com/b?node=1292116011

 

[forker]

Ssd also fails with write fatigue where cells can no longer be written. Also it's slightly incorrect to think of ssd as memory because they are different. Ssd can transfer approx 800mb per second on average while ddr3 can do something like 21gb per second.

 

[hhiusa]

Ssd also fails with write fatigue where cells can no longer be written. Also it's slightly incorrect to think of ssd as memory because they are different. Ssd can transfer approx 800mb per second on average while ddr3 can do something like 21gb per second.

DDR3 as a maximum theoretical transmission rate of 10,666MB/s or 10.666GB/s, not 21GB/s. I even said that solid-state drive through step up but they are ancient history. DDR3 is also ancient history. Apples computer hard drives are no longer hard drives in essence they are flash drives that store larger amounts of data.

 

[forker]

It does in dual channel mode. Anyway I was just making a point. These days I believe it's quad channel which will blow the old stats out the water