Jeremy Zawodny talks about Hardware Failures:
One of the computer industry’s dirty little secrets is hardware failure. The few of us who work in, near, or otherwise around large computer installations take this for granted. Companies like Yahoo have people on staff that spend a lot of their time dealing with failing memory, buggy motherboards, smoked power supplies, bad disks, and overheating CPUs. Google, from what I read, doesn’t even bother anymore.
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Of course, some things fail far more often that others. Usually it’s the disks, or maybe the power supply. All the others combined are much less common that either of those–at least in my experience.
This is why I no longer put data on anything fragile without an off-site backup, RAID, or BOTH.
Spoken like a true software geek. Most software-oriented geeks hate hardware issues. Welcome to the real world, the hardware is just another system that can unexpectedly die for a laundry list of reasons that actually finding out why will cost more in terms of your time than just getting a replacement. Of course then you can have those wonderful hardware/software interaction errors like Windows Standby deciding to croak…
