Chose to keep a client's failing RAID array alive instead of moving to a single SSD, and it came back to bite me 2 weeks later

Drew Martin · 2026-10-01T02:20:04.31856+00:00

Last month a small dentist office off 5th Street called me in because their 6 year old server was making a clicking noise and the front panel light was amber. I had two options: drop in a single 1TB SSD as a quick fix since they only use maybe 200GB, or do it the right way with a fresh RAID 1 pair and a full backup first. I picked the SSD because they were cheap and wanted it done the same day, and honestly I talked myself into it. Two weeks later the office manager calls me at 7am saying none of the chairs can pull up patient charts. The SSD was fine, but the old RAID controller had been masking a bad sector issue on the original drives, and when I pulled them out the whole volume went into a rebuild loop that took down their practice software. I ended up spending 5 hours on a Saturday recovering what I could from a shadow copy. I should have known better, a clicking drive is never a one day job. Anyone else get burned by taking the fast path on a small biz server? How do you explain the extra cost to a client who just wants it working today?

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Chose to keep a client's failing RAID array alive instead of moving to a single SSD, and it came back to bite me 2 weeks later | Computer Technicians - SMM Buzz