I have a customer I built a computer for, he does large format printing and this is his rip machine. I have set him up with an amd quad core 3+ ghz machine. The new 1tb seagate pipeline that I installed less than 3 months ago failed, with AMNF and TOMF errors about 2.5% into the MHDD scan. (data recovery not an issue here)

He's looking for a fail safe system in which I explained there is no such thing. He is willing to dish out some money though. Here's what I'm thinking and where I'd like some recommendations. I want to set him set up with two enterprise drives mirrored. The recommendations I need are what brand HD would you recommend in the 1tb range? I run a computer repair store and when it comes to recommending antivirus, I know what antivirus fail more often (aka Mcaffe) and I don't recommend. What drives do you see the least of in your shops? I know what I have in my shop for failed drives but none of these are enterprise drives, it's usually not required for personal/small business but with this guy time is money and being down for 5 hours while I reloaded his machine yesterday cost him quite a bit.

Next, what would you recommend for a hardware sata raid card for this application?

Thanks in advance,
Dave

I recommend WD RE4 in RAID 1.

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I recommend smaller drives (no more than 250-320 GB) in RAID 10 (require 5 disks) on separate controller for peace of mind, redundancy and performance.

I would use Samsung or Toshiba / Hitachi new series for servers. They don't cost the world,

Raid 1 as a MINIMUM- and a good place to be. If in the budget: Raid 10 - 4 drives (plus 1 as a spare) is the best fastest/reliable compromise.

A customer of mine recently asked for a complete backup system for their IT stuff and when we met to define said "my son says I need a raid 0 with 2 disks he says he does it for..." ... I heard "2 disks" fading away when I was going out of the room because I was leaving....

When someone uses RAID 0 for "backup" reasons, is like having aligators guarding the chickens.

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SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Just to add to the other excellent advice so far, if downtime is such a concern for this user, then remember that (redundant) "RAID" does not equal "backup". Having backups (both local and remote copies, including the ability to do a "bare-bones restore") can be vital for business continuity.

Over the years I have seen several systems which had (redundant) RAID storage, that were unusuable for long periods (or worse), due to a catastropic event (I could list several examples), all because the user had no backups (or at least no readable backups). I suggest that some of his budget should be spent on designing a suitable backup scheme.

Excellent advice Vulcan. A backup should be able to recreate the computer on DISSIMULAR hardware. Products such as Accronis, Paragon, Etc. This image , in my opinion, can be on an external inexpensive drive. When the computer dies- due to real events such as a killer power supply, a backup like this minimizes downtime. A day is still typically lost.

having an identical drive (software and all) sounds like a the best way to go for my customer. Being just a ripping station, he transfers files via USB thumb drive, rips them than prints them. He can replace a hd, I'll just have him get his current drive set up with the configurations working the way he wants it, then image that drive to another so he can just swap it out and have a working rip machine again.

Thanks for all the brain storming,
Dave