It’s rare that Digg has a link to a RAID article with enough popularity to hit the front page, but it happened recently with one here from Jon Bach at Puget Systems. I have no idea who Puget Systems is or who Jon Bach is (apparently he’s the president), but the guy made a few interesting points that our readers may find interesting.

Jon initially came across (to me) as a RAID-Hater when he said he wanted to “educate the public about RAID”, almost as if he was “outing” us. He went on to say that it was just too complicated. That struck me as odd since everything about the computer is complicated – from the OS to the applications to the motherboard, chipsets and CPU. Hopefully complicated doesn’t equate to crappy. [Insert unwarranted Vista hatred here.]

Puget Systems keeps stats that indicate 3% of all drives fail – I assume he meant each year. That number is in the ballpark - anywhere from 1% to 6% is about right. But also in their stats they see that 30% of all RAID controllers fail!?!? Huh?! Considering that all major OEMs (IBM, Dell, HP, …) ship RAID in their mid and high-end servers it seems that a 30% failure rate would be somewhat unacceptable.

But then Jon goes on to make a point that I thought was insightful, if not somewhat obvious, and is the reason I decided to make this post. These RAID controllers that fail 30% of the time (their number, not mine) are the ones that come for free on a $150 motherboard. I think we’d all agree that motherboards are pretty complicated – there are lots of chips and connectors and miscellaneous stuff that I can’t identify. All those parts cost some serious coin. So how much money goes into just the RAID piece of the motherboard. Maybe a buck?

By comparison, how much do you think the aforementioned OEMs pay for their RAID card? Jon throws out a number around $300 – which is kind of close. Some RAID cards are more, and some are less. But regardless of what the exact number is, it’s a LOT more than what you’re paying for motherboard RAID.

So why is that? Well, it could be because OEMs only buy from “real” RAID companies with real Test organizations and real Quality programs. A buck won’t pay for much test time.

I guess you get what you pay for.

Jon makes another good point that I wanted to repeat here. RAID protects you from drive failures. It doesn’t protect you from accidental deletion, user error, viruses, theft, data corruption or disasters that destroy your computer. That’s what backup is for. And hopefully when you do backup, you move it offsite – either via a removable USB drive or an internet-based service like Carbonite. (BTW, I’m simply a user of Carbonite and have no affiliation with them.)

So, let me repeat myself – RAID protects you from drive failures. And if you care about drive failures, and perhaps more importantly you care about downtime (especially if your business is running on these drives) then you probably care enough to buy a real RAID card.

Just say no to dollar store RAID.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 and is filed under Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Tom Treadway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.