Power Surges

clients outside the uk

power surge raid failure
This is a far more common problem for the home user with single hard drives than for enterprise storage systems, who tend to use high-end battery backups (Uninterruptible Power Supplies, or UPS) such as APC that incorporate power surge protection within the unit itself.

For RAID systems especially, having a clean, continuous flow of power is critical – especially for those employing a write-back cache without cache battery backup. In this situation, a power surge or power cut would not only bring the entire RAID system down, but it would be taken down “dirty” – i.e. there would still be data in the buffers, waiting to be written to the array, and this could cause considerable corruption to the data.

A severe power surge on unprotected equipment can actually cause immediate electrical damage and even combustion; when this affects the hard drives and traverses to the drive internals such as the preamplifier and the read/write heads, any data recovery bill is going to be high.