okay here is the story with the most distant parts abbreviated: About 2 years ago my server with RAID 5 and hot spare had 2 drives go bad at the same time and I lost 4 or 5 days of data due to incompetent first-line technical support. Fast forward to about 2 weeks ago. Friday was a busy but good day, I was planning on updating Amazing Charts to 6.5 Saturday morning. I come into the office, and my server was down. my office closed Friday night around 6 PM, and the off-server backup was to run at 4 AM, I lost Friday's data, and it basically took the whole weekend for me to get the office up and running temporarily for Monday morning. The next week I discovered there had been a small power blip but the server is on a UPS. The server would not boot, the problem I later discovered was the integrated RAID controller and ANOTHER failed hard drive. A mother board would effectively cost more than simply replacing the server, and would not have been available fast enough to keep my office running. I have totally lost faith in Hewlett-Packard. I am currently running on a temporary windows 7 Pro unit quite successfully, and await a new IBM server. I am hopeful that if something should fail with RAID 1, I would be able to pull a good drive and get my data off rapidly. I have been told that 2008R2 is more stable than 2012, I still can have my IT set up as domain, but I have many XP machines in the system which are working well (almost disposable.) I think I will postpone my upgrade to 6.5 until after the new server is put in place rather than trying to do both at once.
