A Barracuda on my Hetzner server failed 1 hour ago. This is the second time I had disk trouble at Hetzner - the first time both RAID disks failed at the same time.

However, support is acting incredibly quickly, within 5 minutes of sending the support request they got to work on the server.

Both disks failing at the same time might indicate that the problem is with the controller or cables. One of our disks (at Hetzner) died on us a few months ago and unearthed an issue with backups. :(

Because of missing data we asked for a data cable replacement first (instead of just replacing the disk) - and it worked. Even more, it works without problems since. YMMV of course.

BTW, I have worked with many providers but Hetzner is my favourite. Great support and very few problems.

In my case I think it actually was the drives though, it was the same model Barracuda. Looks like they're replacing them with Toshibas now, so I'm hopeful.

> BTW, I have worked with many providers but Hetzner is my favourite. Great support and very few problems.

I'll second this. Support is/was often a horror story for me, but so far Hetzner has been absolutely impeccable.

Contrast this with Mediatemple, where I once had to engage in a lengthy support battle with a chain of incredibly ignorant and condescending support staff before being escalated to a senior person who finally, finally admitted I had found huge problem with the cluster. This took several days of intermittent outages, dozens of emails, and a lot of energy...

I also had a double disk failure on my Hetzner server quite recently. The server didn't respond, and when I hardware reset it began rebuilding the RAID, but it didn't say which disk failed. It happened again very shortly. Hetzner changed the cables and it has now been a month without any issues.

After the disk failures, however, some of the virtual images I had on there had trouble booting. They were complaining about bad blocks. After running fsck they ran again.

The whole experience made me realize that I really need to run on a filesystem with checksumming. Just plain RAID-1 only helps for a limited subset of errors, and only if it is able to detect which disk failed correctly.

I have a couple of ST33000651AS in my server, they failed several times, but the current pair has been running for more than 1 year, I guess they just got a nasty batch.

Needless to say, rebuilding 3 TB raid took a long time and downtime and pain... but all in all, it was worth it, considering the prices.

I can also confirm support was quite fast, even if some of the replacement drives were not new and some even came with bad sectors lol ... such is life.