Well, the hard drive on my main machine started throwing read failures this weekend, and then finally would no longer boot the system because of it. The sucker is only 6-months old from Western Digital. I still have IDE drives that work fine from 10+ years ago. I'm not writing off SATA, but I certainly have had more drive failures recently compared to past history and they've been SATA drives, one at full-time work and one at home. I played a bit of musical chairs with drives at home as I can't wait for the warranty replacement to get back up and running. I moved a 250GB drive that was acting as my network file store out of my server to the client PC and bought a 500GB drive from Circuit City to replace it in the server.

Really this just brought to the forefront my data protection strategies at home. I currently store any data that means anything to me on a central server at home that then gets backed up to a separate (geographical) host every night, encrypting the sensitive data. Unfortunately though, I do not mirror any of my local drives. So, the process of recovering from a failure is still a bit painful. If the drive went out on my server, I would be hurting. I wouldn't lose any data, but it would still be tremendously painful, especially because it is the PDC, SQL Server, Forefront Server and WSUS for my entire network. It has two drives, one being for the server itself and the second being the aforementioned file store for the whole network.  

I'm thinking I should mirror the drive on the server (RAID-1) and then purchase a separate NAS device to use for the central storage. It is too costly to mirror all of the client PCs in the network, but I need to shore up the server. I need to find a drive enclosure that acts as a NAS device and plugs directly into the network. That way I can take the 500GB replacement drive move it to NAS, then take the warranty drive they are sending me and use it for mirroring in the server. Wow it is fun taking care of a home network. Sometimes I wonder if it is truly worth all of the hassle.