I buy full tower cases to build my computers so I will have plenty of room to place the removable hard drive frames so they are not directly opposite the power supply. I have found the magnetic fields of the power supply can cause operating system crashes and "The Blue Screen of Death" if the "C" drive is directly off the end of the power supply. I buy my removable trays with frames from computergate.com for $9 to $20 each (they are cheap and easy to install). Any one of the backup hard drive copies can be swapped out with the primary hard drive as they are an exact duplicate of the "C" drive. Just plug it in and reboot. Catoosa
We have some SCSI shared bus systems and some clusters but these really only pay for themselves in very limited circumstances. On most of our Windows servers we simply use Mirrored IDE drives: Windows 2000 / 2003 Mirroring really works very well once you understand the tricks and it is a very low cost solution to acheiveing a degree of fault tolerance: you can simply mirror the OS volume and if one drive fails simply use your repair disk to activate the mirrored drive and throw in a new duplicate drive and re-mirror. This process allows very small system downtimes - a few minutes which for most applications (and probably for most traders) is acceptable with respect to business loss costs - and the software mirroring really does not slow down drive access significantly enough to affect most applications ....
Is "Windows Mirroring" like Roxio Go Back? I found Go Back to slow things down an annoying amount... and the HD seemed to be constantly reading and writing.
Mirroring would for sure be of use in a server that you do not want to shut down. If one hard drive fails, the system will fall back to the mirror image; But, what happens if you get file corruption, disk write errors, or a virus on the "C" and your mirror drive then has the same problems on it as the "C" drive? Catoosa
Have done disaster recovery plan in my past corp job. Like to KISS for my own system. I personally do not need a cluster server setup, my heart beat is good enough. Mirror/RAID5 is over-killed for me. The setup requires to purchase servers, too noisy for my ear Maybe in the future when I trade tons of $$$, then I can not afford to have any downtime. Hopefully I will learn some simple trading strategies that do not require so much effort.
Well, its true it could happen - although with Virus detection software and running Windows 2000 since 1999 we have had no problems on the production boxes so configured..... Mirroring is just one solution for fault tolerance and the applicability of any particular approach depends upon your system availability needs. If you can be down for a couple hours - and your time is not expensive - then you just re-install. Again it depends upon the dollar loss per unit time. If a system is down for a few minutes and you lose big dollars then even the expense of a cluster may make sense ....
And you can have adequate protection with just a 2nd HD + cloning software. Simple, fast and cheap insurance against losing irreplaceable data or the hassle of having to reinstall a system from scratch.
I have posted earlier: "Now I only copy all my data to a CD once a month & have not done a complete disaster recovery plan. In May I will try to do a more professional setup: 2 pc in a network, 1 connects to DSL & the other connects to cable modem. Both will have identical data for fault tolerance. I still will burn CD once a month. Maybe keep one in my bank safety box. Keep 1 with my relative out-of-state. It is my off-site backup." That is good enough for me. It may not be good enough for others.
Mirroring is certainly applicable to desktop computers (not just servers as some have asserted). It's not a substitute for routine backups and offsite storage of backups for disaster recovery purposes. But you'll definitely appreciate it when your hard drive crashes while you have trades active and you're 1 day from your next monthly backup. Mirroring is a cheap and painless fault tolerance measure that makes your life easier if you ever do have a hard drive crash or media problem. It's not a solution if your house burns down (you'll need an off site disaster recovery backup for that), but then again a hard drive crash is far more likely than a house fire or similar disaster - that is unless you live in the hills around LA during brush fire season, are near an active volcano, are in a high burglery rate neighborhood, are in a trailer park in a tornado zone, or live in Baghdad