External SSD

Do external solid state drives make sense to increase reliability?

I've heard that external solid state drives are not worth it because using Firewire or USB, they are no faster than traditional hard drives.

But I'm not really looking for speed (although it's always nice). I'm looking for reliability.

We have a Mini-Server that has two mirrored internal drives for the operating system and applications.

We store our work in progress (graphics) files on an external 1 TB hard drive that is also mirrored. And we back up the work files to an additional 1 TB hard drive and the cloud using a service called Crashplan.

So he have three redundant 1 TB drives for the files and two redundant 500GB drives for the OS.

Between these five drives, one fails every 6 to 8 weeks. This has been true ever since the server was new three years ago. I'm on my third IT service company and no one can explain it other than to say the drives are constantly spinning and they wear out. Most IT guys recommend additional redundancy. The latest recommendation is to replace these drives with a five drive RAID array.

But I'm not so much looking for easy replacement when a drive fails as more reliable drives. We don't lose data (it's already in three or four places), but when a drive fails, we start to get disruptive failures and error messages throughout the network.

Will SSD's improve this or is there another solution you'd recommend?

 

Thanks for the buyers guide. I am unaware of any of our IT guys installing anything other than off the shelf hard drives.

The guide you posted strongly recommends Hitachi drives, which are apparently no longer marketed as Hitachis. What would I look for to identity i "red" hard drive.