How common are power supply failures in comparison to hard disk failures

hardware

My webhost offers two different types of high availability options for dedicated servers:

  1. Redundant hard disks (RAID1)

  2. Redundant hard disks (RAID1) plus redundant power supply

How common is a power supply failure in comparison to hard disk failure? I know it's not possible to know the exact figures without knowing the exact hardware, but ballpark figures are good enough for me at the moment.

Thanks,

Adrian

Best Answer

I generally see hard drives fail a LOT more than power supplies. In any given year I'll likely replace 20 or 30 hard drives and maybe only 3 or 4 power supplies. One thing to note about redundant power supplies, if they're just redundant its nice, if they're load balancing + redundant its amazing. Other than a pair of direct lightening hits, at different clients, I've never had to worry about redundant/load balanced power supplies going bad. Theres something about the load balancing that gets done that really helps keep power supplies healthy. I've often replaced entire servers before replacing power supplies when they're load balanced.

Related Topic