What are the cost trade-offs of reducing server hard drive failures? What can be done to mitigate consequences to drive failures?

Can we reduce the chance of hard drives failing, and at what cost/ benefit?

Ideas and our current thoughts

Invest in more reliable disk drives

More reliable disk drives cost more money. Fortunately we tend to avoid plain consumer grade ones for the servers and invest in ones like WD's "Red" (good) and "Black" (better).

• On 3/27/13, we bought a WD "Black" 2TB for $160-170.

Buy Solid State Drives (SSD's).

Consider doing this whenever the smaller size is acceptable, and cost for that smaller size is also acceptable.

From Roger,re: False disk failures:

http://www.techspot.com/news/52047-what-is-false-disk-failure-and-why-is-it-a-problem.html

Can we reduce the consequence of hard drives failing, and at what cost/ benefit?

Ideas and our current thoughts

Invest learning how to better deploy and use monitoring tools.

S.M.A.R.T.