Flashback to 1993, when this manufacturing company buys its first RAID 5 storage system — which takes some special preparation, according to a pilot fish working there.

“The RAID array was for serving the data needs of a factory machine that had to run 24/7,” fish says. “During the initial setup, we did a lot of testing of the hardware, to ensure that it was worth the investment and to give us administrative experience.

“For example, we would pull single drives to simulate hardware failure, then replace them with our spare drives to simulate the repair, all while running the server under a mock load.

“We would also pull multiple drives to corrupt the RAID, so that we could play with backups and restores. I was helped in this project by two other IT people, Fred and Barney.

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