Over a year ago, we wrote about being ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish’, or rather advising not to be! Well, I have another very concrete example of how spending a bit more money up front saved me a whole lot of time and by extension, money.

I’ll nutshell it up front:
I built my computer with the operating system on a RAID 1 array. One of the physical drives in that array crashed hard, so I pulled it out, sent it back to the manufacturer (it was still under warranty), got a new one and replaced it. That’s it. No rebuilding the operating systems, no reinstalling applications, no recovery from backups, pretty much very little heartache.

The longer story:
I decided to split up the storage on my latest desktop computer with the operating system on one set of disks and most of the data on different ones. I could have installed the OS on just 1 physical hard drive. I decided to be cautious and double up on hard drives and use RAID 1 mirroring to protect against 1 drive going kaput. I made sure that the motherboard could support RAID natively. The additional hard drive cost about $150, and the mobo probably cost about $25 than one without RAID. That was in early 2007, and those prices are even lower today.

So 2.5 years after I built that system, one of those hard drives died. I could hear the very loud ‘tick, tick, tick’ sound of the head hitting the disk. A quick look in the RAID BIOS confirmed that it also had an issue recognizing the drive. Uh-oh.

I was about to buy a new replacement drive when I remembered that it was probably still under warranty by Western Digital. WD has a nice website that lets you plug in your serial # to see if it’s still covered. Check.

I ran through their recommended tests (even though I was confident the drive was toast), filled out the paperwork, packed up the drive and shipped it. Time and cost: about 2 hours and $5.

Within about 10 days, I had the replacement drive. I stuck it back in the drive cage, powered up, went into the RAID BIOS which immediately recognized the new drive and asked if I wanted to add it to the original RAID array. Check. Time taken: 15 minutes.

While it took many hours for the array to rebuild (copy over the data from the good drive to the new one), my computer was still usable, and I was now secure in the knowledge that I had redundant drives again.

I estimate that had I lost the OS and had to reinstall, that it would have taken me a good 12 hours (I have a lot of applications!), and that’s not including the time over the next few weeks as I discovered little missing pieces of data or settings that I would either need to re-create or fish out of a backup.

The extra $175 that I spent 2.5 years probably saved me many more times that amount, not to mention a lot of stress.

While I know more than the average bear about computers, you can still apply this to your own situation: buy a  pre-built machine that has redundancy in its storage (and possibly other subsystems). Talk to your tech friends and get their input and advice. Spend the extra money. It’s like insurance. And when you cash in, you’ll be glad you did.

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