hardware Archives - Page 6 of 7

What is RAID and Should Your Business be Using it?

hardware, Office ITRAID, serversOphtek, LLC

Apr 2015

Find out what RAID is and whether your critical business systems need it. Learn all the basics to ensure your data stays secured regardless of your set-up.

RAID is short for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”. The “I” in RAID can also be referred to as “Inexpensive”, which can also be true.

RAID stores your data across multiple hard disks for the benefit of:

Providing faster volume– Quicker to access data

Facilitates redundancy– Allowing seamless data access when a given number of disks fail.

In other words it helps prevent data loss when a hard drive fails by allowing the other hard drives to pick up the slack

One thing to bear in mind is that RAID data redundancy configurations are not immune to malware attacks, natural disasters and data beaches. As mentioned before, what it’s good for is preventing against hardware failure and maintaining uptime.

Popular RAID levels

RAID levels refer to how hard disks are configured to work alongside each other. There are three common RAID configurations that you’ll mostly hear about:

RAID 0- offers the benefit of fast access to read and write data by having it distributed across the disks. The main disadvantage is that it offers no protection when a drive in this arrangement fails, as it’ll be the missing piece that jeopardises this arrangement leading to unreadable data.
RAID 1– Mirrors the data in drives paired together. This offers better failover protections. In the case of one drive failing the data would still be available on the other disk whilst the failed drive is replaced. It also comes with the disadvantage of using up half of the disk space that is used to hold the mirrored data from the other disk. This means it’s a more costly solution.
RAID 5– provides the best of both worlds, with data redundancy and faster access to it. It distributes data across all disks like with a RAID 0 setup and covers data with parity. In the case of failover, it’ll recover data like it does with RAID1. You’ll need to consider the minimum number of disks required for this setup, which is three, and uses one third of the disk capacity to hold the disk parity information.
JBOD– Stands for “just a bunch of disks”. It’s not really considered to be a RAID however it is available alongside other RAIDs as a choice on most varieties of storage boxes. This only bunches a group of disks into one volume, where data will be filled until it becomes full and then moves onto the next available disk. With this, there’s isn’t any benefit of faster data access and redundancy. This is only good to use as a last resort.

What is RAID suitable for?

RAID is not really suitable for standard desktop computers, unless there’s a reason to store hundreds of gigabytes worth of critical data. Instead, it’s better suited on all servers and NAS (network attached storage) devices that share content and resources or that hold large amounts of data.

NAS devices simply act as additional storage that can be plugged into a network.

Since managing storage volumes on servers and NAS devices can seem like a headache to maintain, we suggest using an automated RAID management system such as SHR.

SHR by Synology, stands for Synology Hybrid RAID. It’s not even essential to know about all types of RAID setups as SHR takes care to quickly configure storage volume and deploy it according to your requirements. Unlike the classic RAID setups, SHR allows anyone to maximize their disk usage. There’s a lot more flexibility too, where you can scale up with additional disks within an already configured volume.

For more ways to secure your data and systems, contact your local IT professionals.

Best Hard Drive to Invest In

hardware, Office IThard drives, office IT, storageOphtek, LLC

Mar 2015

Which is the best hard drive to invest in? With many brands to choose from, we’ll disclose our findings from our best source so you can secure your data.

Backblaze, a large data center that offers online backups, has published a new report to advise on the best hard drives to use. Their results are based on the numerous hard disks they use to run their business.

With over 34,000 active hard drives onsite holding 100 petabytes, they have plenty of experience for anyone interested.

Last year we published an article based on the best hard drives for reliability and durability. To recap on our research, the most reliable brand was Hitachi GST 1.5TB and 3 TB capacities and the least were the 3TB Western Digital and Seagate drives.

Note that Backblaze’s observations are based on a limited range of brands which include Western Digital, Hitachi and Seagate drives. They do use Toshiba and Samsung drives, however, their numbers are not quite as many to provide statistical results.

In this article, we’ll drill down to which drive models last the longest and work the best.

Considerations based on this study

Since Backblaze is a growing online backup business, they need cost effective solutions that give the best results, which is why there are more hard disks being used in particular brands than others. That’s not to say that they’ll never try out more expensive hard disks out in their data center.

Another consideration from their study is the exclusion on energy efficient drives, such as the Seagate LP (low power) 2TB drives and Western Digital Green 3TB drives. These two drives are just not suited for running a 24/7 online business as their power saving feature makes the drives spin down aggressively when not in use, causing them to wear down faster. They had also noted plenty of errors with these drives due to the latter.

Seagate drives

With the 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda LP drives, it’s been observed that they’ve been consistently good with an average age of nearly 4 years. Their annual failure rate is not the best at 9.9%, but it’s not the worst either.
On the other hand, the 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 has around the same durability as the LP model but with 25.4% annual fail rate, which worsens as they age.
The larger 2TB to 4 TB, like their smaller 1.5 TB versions, are also very reliable but do play up as they age. These include Seagate Barracuda 3TB, Seagate Barracuda 3TB XT and Seagate Barracuda 3TB LP, which all have over 7 % annual failure rate at an average of 1.5 to 2 years.
The exception is with the 4TB Seagate Desktop HDD.15, with an average age of 0.3% and a reliable 3.8 % annual fail rate.
Seagate drives are consistent in their performance, perhaps not the best, but they’re really affordable, which is why they make up most of Backblaze’s Hard disk inventory.

Hitachi drives

The 2TB Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K2000, 3TB Hitachi GST Deskstar 5K3000, 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 and 3TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 all have an average annual failure rate ranging between 0.9 to 1.5%.

Their average age is 2 years. These are really reliable, as shown in the statistics and are by far the best performing brand out of the lot.

The only drawback is their premium price.

Western Digital

The 1 TB Western Digital Green (WD10EADS) and 1TB Western Digital Green (WD10EACS) are durable drives with an average age of 4years.
However 3TB Western Digital Red (WD30EFRX) has only an average lifespan of 0.5 years.
The average annual fail rate of these, with the exception of 3TB drive, is 3.4%.
These drives are the second favorite to the Hitachi ones, but are also priced higher than the Seagate ones.

Smooth drive operation statistics

In a large data center, such as Backblaze’s data center environment, certain brands run smoothly and work well within their disk array configuration-without creating too much work!

The following are the percentages of untroubled operation by brand:

Out of 12956 Hitachi drives, 99.99% are active pretty much all of the time with only a mere 0.01% trouble rate.
Out of 933 Western digital drives, they’re active 99.83% of the time and only recorded to trouble 0.17% of the time.
Out of 12459 Seagate drives, they’re active 99.72% of the time and have a 0.28% trouble rate.
Out of the three brands, Hitachi offers the most resilient hard drives with 96.9% survival rate in three years.
The batch of Western Digital Drives have some dying off near the start of implementation.
The ones who survive the start are likely to keep going and have a survival rate of 94.8% after three years.
The Seagate drives start off strong but drop off as they age. Their survival rate after 36 months is 73.5%.
Seagate drives have a reputation for good performance but can suffer as they age and are really affordable.
Hitachi offers the best performance in terms of reliability and durability but at the cost of a higher than average price for a hard drive.
Western digital is a good all-rounder brand to use. Backblaze highly recommends the Western Digital 3TB Red (WD30EFRX).
The ones they advise to avoid are Seagate 2TB LP and Western Digital 3TB Green drives, as they’ve not worked well in their environment.

Overall summary of Drives

It’s been approximately three years since Western Digital acquired Hitachi’s 2.5″ hard drive business. Toshiba has also acquired Hitachi’s 3.5″ hard drive business. Could this mean a change, possibly an improvement of quality in any of these brands? We will have to wait and see.

For more ways to secure your data and systems, contact your local IT professionals.

Protecting Computers and Servers from Power Surges

Backup and Recovery, hardwarepower surges, ServerOphtek, LLC

Jan 2015

Aside from backups and security, protecting your servers and workstations from power surges, thunder storms and power outages helps avoid costly downtime.

You may have wondered if a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) and Surge protectors are necessary and worth the extra cost in your office IT infrastructure. We’ll clarify that for you and explain each one in more detail.

Standalone Surge Protectors

A surge protector exists to protect working computers, computer peripherals and devices from power surges emanating from a primary power source.

How surge protectors work

The standard US voltage for homes and office premises is 120 volts. A power surge is anything the goes well over 120 volts. When this happens, it’s highly likely that your plugged in devices will receive this surge of power than can result in damage to the component power supply or other parts of the system as well.

Surge protectors work by transferring the excess voltage via the device’s grounding wire, stopping it from reaching the electronic device. This still allows it to receive the normal voltage needed to operate seamlessly. This way it helps maintain your electronic devices over a long period of time. This rings true, as unprotected devices can cease to work without warning due to burnt components or wires that may have been exposed to surges through the wire over time.

Electrical storms

No matter how good your power surge is, it cannot protect your device from a sudden increase of intense power experienced by thunder storms, which can be millions of volts! Your best bet will be to unplug all devices that you have and wait for the storm to pass.

Cost

You can acquire lower end surge protectors for as little as $20-$40. Good brands to consider are Belkin and Tripplite.

UPS – Uninterruptable Power Supplies

As the name suggests, a UPS is a device designed to keep your computer running for a given period of time when building power is suddenly disrupted or cut off.

How UPS works

The remaining power to keep your computers, servers or equipment running is stored in a battery, which kicks in when loss of main power is detected. This is useful during a power outage and will allow you a limited time to save any work on your computer, so you can have shut it down gracefully. Most UPS devices will automatically initiate a shut down on your server or workstation once a power outage is detected, so there’s no need for a manual shut down.

Most UPS on the market come with surge protection, which will take the edge off the power spike to protect your system components from being damaged. You can even get software that will auto save any documents and data when the UPS is triggered.

Power Outage

Imagine you have a small office, and without realizing it, a power surge occurs followed by a power outage during a heavy storm. If you had UPS devices paired up to your most critical computer systems you’ll be glad to know that the whole day’s work would not be lost, and your system would still be running on battery or at a worst case gracefully shutting the computers down.

The UPS protected computer had received a higher voltage spike ( 120+ Volts). That extra voltage was redirected to the UPS power surge component protecting the computer. Now you have this computer running on UPS battery. This can give you approximately around 20 minutes to half an hour to save all the day’s work before the UPS shuts down the system.

Cost

UPS devices are more costly than surge protectors. You can get a decent one around $100, such as Cyberpower or the more expensive ones, such as APC Smart starting around $320. UPS is that they also comes built with surge protectors, as well acting as a battery, which is why they are more expensive than a standalone surge protector.

Surge protector or UPS?

If you’re still deciding between purchasing a UPS or a surge protector, we suggest you first consider your personal circumstance. For instance, if you run and manage an entire office or department that deals with very important data and you wish to preserve your systems throughout all kinds of power fluctuations, the UPS would be your best option.

The same goes if you’re a person who works from home and the work you do on your computer is your livelihood, then a UPS would be the best choice for you.
In the scenario where you just use your own PC for occasional work, and web browsing, a surge protector may be a better choice.

For more ways to protect your critical business systems, servers and components, contact your local IT professionals.

5 Most Important Considerations of a New PC

hardware, Office ITcomputer, laptop, updateOphtek, LLC

Dec 2014

Whether you’re buying a new PC for the office, your business or personal use, here are the features you should focus on to get the most bang for your buck.

We’re going to highlight the 5 most important features to look for in a new PC. But before we delve onto our list of five important features, let’s discuss a preliminary checklist:

What are you going to use your PC for? You’ll need to determine if you’re going to be using to for work, where potentially, data protection and backups will be crucial. Even if it’s for personal use, you’ll still want to consider securing your data and backing up your documents, photos, emails and so forth, periodically.

What software will you use? General word processing and other similar office applications are not so resource intensive. On the other hand, if you are planning on using a resource hungry program, such as a graphic design software, or anything that requires a PC with a fast processor and plenty of memory, you’ll need to take note of the minimum specifications. Even the minimum specifications on a PC for any given software will not guarantee the best performance.

Optical CD drive, anyone? If anyone remembers the phasing out of the floppy disk drives in the mid nineties, the same thing is happening to optical CD drives. They are fast becoming a legacy component, thanks to this age of digital downloads, portable USB storage and online video streaming sites. You’ll need to consider whether you’ll want one with an optical drive or not. Alternatively, you can purchase an external CD/ DVD drive if you really needed one for any intended purpose.

With all these preliminary requirements covered, let’s now dive into our checklist for the 5 most important features to look for when shopping for a new PC

Customer support.

When it comes purchasing something new, you’ll want peace of mind and know that you can call a phone support line and have a warranty to replace faulty parts. Also, some PCs may require registration in order to activate its warranty, so if you’ve any questions, you know where to call.

Opt for reputable brands.

Brands like Dell, HP or Lenovo, have a well-established community which also means that finding replacement parts is easy and less of a struggle.

Double-check the preloaded software.

Never feel too afraid to ask the sales rep about the software that comes pre-loaded with the PC. If you need a full version of Office software, make sure it has that and not just trial versions or 90 days’ worth of the full version. This is important if you heavily rely on using such software, as you won’t appreciate a break in your productivity whilst acquiring the full version!

Watch out for unnecessary software.

Be sure to find out if it comes loaded with junk software from the manufacturer pressuring you to sign up to their services. This is often a sales pitch, and from our experience, a complete waste of time, money and digital space! Just focus on what you really need and stick to your requirements.

Check the PC’s specifications.

You’ll want to look for a PC that has a fast processor and plenty of RAM. Many store sales brag about sub $300 systems, when in reality they are cutting corners like memory and processor speed.

Too often people have been mis-sold the wrong type of PC and software that comes with it. Don’t be afraid to ask how systems you are comparing stack up against others in the market.

For more tips and advice on deploying the right PC workstations for your business or home office, contact your local IT professionals.

How to Check Your Hard Drive Usage

hardware, Security, SoftwareDrive, Hard, Problem, UsageOphtek, LLC

Sep 2014

Has your computer been sluggish lately? Your hard drive usage could be too high and on its way to a crash. Here’s how to check if it’s working too hard.

Your hard drive is the main storage of your computer. It holds your pictures, videos, office or business software among everything else running on your PC. If you’ve already scanned for malware, removed unnecessary programs and toolbars, checked your CPU and your memory then it may be time to check your hard drive. Programs malfunctioning in the background can read and write unnecessarily from your hard causing your computer to slow down.

To find out if your hard drive is overwhelmed, first click the Start button and choose Computer.

In Windows 8, hold down the key and press the F key. Click Apps > PC. For more on how to make Windows 8 look and behave like Windows 7, please consult the following IT article.

Clicking on your hard drive will show the free space available. Even if you have plenty of space available, your hard drive could be reading and writing too much.

To find out if that is the case, first open the task manager by right clicking the bar at the bottom of the screen.

Select Start Task Manager.

Under the Performance tab, select Resource Monitor.

Under Processes with Disk Activity, you can view which processes are accessing the hard drive for reading and writing. Any process that looks unfamiliar should be googled. Many sites will help you discriminate between legitimate and suspicious processes.

Under Disk Activity, you can view the exact bytes per second each process is using for reading and writing. If any process is using an inordinate amount reading and writing capacity, several possibilities exist.

One possibility is the software governing the wayward process could be malfunctioning. To find out if this is the case, close and re -open the program. If you cannot close the program normally, go back to the Task Manager.

Under the Processes tab, highlight the process in question and click End Process.

Check the Resource Monitor again to see if the process is still reading and writing with the same bytes per second. If it is, you might want to uninstall and re- install the program. Go to the Start menu and select Control Panel.

From the Control Panel, select either Programs and Features or Uninstall a Program (this will depend on the type of menu you have).

Highlight the targeted program and click uninstall.

Install the program again and see if the reading and writing speeds are different.

If the high reading and writing speeds persist, the computer could be infected with malware. For more on how to detect and remove malware, please consult the following IT article.

If malware is not the culprit for the aberrant reading and writing, your hard disk could have errors. Once again, go to Start > Computer. Right click your hard drive and select Properties.

Click the Tools tab. Under Error checking, click Check now.

Provide authentication if you are requested for it. If the scan detects problems, select both Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.

Click Start. You will be prompted to reschedule a disk check the next time you restart your computer. Allow the disk check to proceed upon restart.

If this doesn’t manage to sort out the reading and writing problems, you could have a defective hard disk. Temporarily installing another hard disk on your PC with the same software should give you a reference on whether the abnormal reading and writing stems from physical problems with the hard drive. Note if the reading and writing speeds for the same processes are dramatically different for the different hard drives. If they are, going with a new hard drive might be the best bet.

For more information about hard drive errors and other problems affecting your SOHO or office PCs, consult your local IT professional.

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Category Archives: hardware

Popular RAID levels

What is RAID suitable for?

Considerations based on this study

Seagate drives

Hitachi drives

Western Digital

Smooth drive operation statistics

Overall summary of Drives

Standalone Surge Protectors

How surge protectors work

Electrical storms

Cost

UPS – Uninterruptable Power Supplies

How UPS works

Power Outage

Cost

Surge protector or UPS?