I have been dealing with a lot of computer issues lately. (See my posts in the WHS forums) I was not sure where to post this one, so please forgive me if I chose a bad spot.
One of my client machines is a Dell 6400 Mobile Workstation. It has two hard drive bays to which I recently installed two brand new SanDisk Solid State 480 GB drives. Everything was humming along fine for a while and then one of the SanDisk drives failed (The C Drive). I contacted the manufacturer and they sent out a replacement drive. Terrific. Installed the drive and then used my WHS V1 server to restore a backup to the machine.
All was well again for a while, until it wasn't... One day, the SSD (the C Drive again) failed again. So back on the phone with SanDisk and they again agreed to RMA the drive and the new one is on its way.
I have heard that Solid State Drives are great until they fail, and that failure happens suddenly without warning. This has largely been my experience. I also have an SSD in my other system and (knock on wood) it is working just fine.
As I wait for the new drive to arrive, I am planning to simply restore the backup from the server again. This is the quickest way to get it back up and running and avoids the issues of having software (like Adobe and Apple) that I cannot de-authorize on the old machine since I no longer have the bad drive.
However, I have started to wonder if there was something corrupt in the backup??? I mean, what are the chances that two Solid State Drives would fail in under a month? Is it even possible that corruption on the system could cause a physical failure on the drive? Does anyone have any experience with this? Is there a way to test if there is something wrong with the backup?
Just a few other bits of info: In my other posts, I have been having issues with my WHS V1 EX495 server. I actually had to reset my backup database recently to clear up the problem which has mostly worked. I have also been seriously considering the switch to WHS 2011 and bought the disk, debug board, etc. So now I am just waiting to get this client computer back up and running before making the switch. Is it possible that there has been corruption of some kind on this client computer, that caused the hardware failures and was also responsible for corrupting the backup database on the server? Is this way too much of a stretch, or is it plausible?
Last point: I have some spare hard drives. They are not SSD, but I could possibly install one in the client system, restore the backup and then test it somehow for corruption? But how? What sort of tests would I run?
I run Avast antivirus on the server, and Windows Security Essentials on the clients.
Thank you very much.