[dangrossman]

When you buy unmanaged servers, the host isn't monitoring RAID health -- they don't have any remote access to your machine except maybe IPMI for reboots. I've rented servers from various providers for a decade and none has ever monitored my hard drives... plenty have failed, including disks in a RAID and RAID adapters themselves; they get replaced when I call up and tell someone the server won't boot and I need someone to go take a look.

[ashray]

You're right, I seem to have gotten lucky with my unmanaged hosting (3 times over with different hosts). They seem to have some sort of hardware interface to monitor RAID health, of course, this is hardware RAID so maybe that's where the setup differs. I was surprised when I received an email from them one morning about a year ago saying "Hey, one of your RAID drives failed so we replaced it, just FYI".

It's true that a RAID failure may go unnoticed by a sysadmin for a year or more if they don't have proper checks setup for themselves.

I guess the only thing that could've been done in this case was to have a backup cronjob or use a provider that takes care of this stuff..

[gregd]

Thank you. This was exactly what I was getting at. 1&1 is on the short list of budget hosts that are notorious for doing the bare minimum to get your money.