1 TB dead! Waaaah!

[miriam_e]

One of my 1 terabyte drives has suddenly, inexplicably died. Waaah! I bought it less than a year ago and it was almost full. Some of it was backed up, but much wasn't -- how do you backup a 1TB drive? The only way is with a second 1TB drive, and I didn't think I could afford to splash out on another drive merely as backup for my most recent drive. The disk itself is under warranty, but the data is the most valuable part.

Crap. Crap. Crap!

I'd been getting creepy, uneasy feelings about my oldest drive -- a now-ancient 120GB drive almost 7 years old, and was trying to gather the funds to buy a backup drive to safeguard the data on it. Who would have thought that my youngest drive would be the first to die. :(

Dammit!

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

how do you backup a 1TB drive?
With 222 DVDs?

I'm sorry to hear this. It reminds me I need to get around to updating my backups.

The good thing is that 1TB drives are coming down and down and down in price. The bad thing is we just tend to fill them up with stuff, when we remember.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

One thing I meant to mention, but I had to stop to butcher some co-orkers: last time my laptop drive died I had a few instances of rebooting where I was able to log in and copy off some data.

Sadly I squandered them and lost years worth of work and e-mails, but I'm wondering if yours is really hosed, or if there might be some spark of life?

I seem to recall reading of some Linux disc recovery tools. Have you looked into them? I have no idea how they work, but I'm wondering of your drive is getting power if it might be possible to get an image, even if it is incomplete.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

My machine doesn't even see the drive, even at the lowest level in the BIOS. [sigh]

Next time I go in to town I'll take the drive in to the shop where I bought it and see if it shows up on any of their machines. I don't think it will though. I'm not admitting total defeat yet however. Last option will be to try taking the little circuit board off the drive and swapping over another from an identical drive I have that still works. That is a scary, final, desperate act though.

I've used Linux to retrieve data from friends' MSWindows machines for them. Linux is marvelous for that, particularly Puppy Linux, because you can boot a Windows system into Puppy from an ordinary CD, or a thumbdrive and have a full, easy-to-use windowing operating system available to look through drives, and burn CDs or DVDs, or copy stuff to flash drives, or external hard drives.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

It reminds me I need to get around to updating my backups.

Consider this a very scary warning. This was not some old veteran waiting on its expiry date. It should not have happened. Oh, woe.

Good that they are getting cheaper, but not much use if they are going to die at random intervals. [sigh]

I am starting to like external hard drives. They don't run if not connected to the computer, and if they are not running they are not wearing out. Also, by being disconnected from the computer much of the time they are isolated from some dangers -- not such a problem on my system because I'm running Linux instead of disease-ridden MSWindows, and I have a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) which blocks mains spikes and dropouts. And lastly, external drives can be carried to friends' and relatives more easily than a whole computer. I think I'll replace this dead drive with an external 1TB drive.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

It should not have happened. Oh, woe.

I had a drive die on me within weeks (2-3) of purchasing it. Fortunately I hadn't had much time to accumulate stuff on it.

I keep much of my stuff on external USB now. I progressively back stuff up on DVD but it's not an ideal given USB drive failure rates and I am well behind because copying 4GB of data over USB1 takes an ice age.

I think Officeworks was recently selling 1TB drives as cheap as $120, whereas 2TB drives were closer to $300.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I had a drive die on me within weeks (2-3) of purchasing it.

Oh jeez! Lucky you had not put too much on it yet.

USB drive failure rates? Do you mean external hard drives or do you mean thumb drives?

A chill ran down my spine when you mentioned Officeworks... Not a long time ago I bought a drive at Officeworks. Oh god. I wonder if that was this. In that case I won't have the ability to return it under warranty. I doubt I'll be able to find the receipt, not least because they print them on thermal paper that fades after a few months. I should check through my VISA card details... I buy most such things using that. Lucky that I always write the date I bought a drive on the drive itself, so I know exactly when I bought it.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

USB drive failure rates? Do you mean external hard drives or do you mean thumb drives?

External USB drives - the big beasts. Not your traditional platter drive (do they still use platters? I thought so) in cradles. I've only ever had one thumbdrive fail, but that was on second use.

Lucky that I always write the date I bought a drive on the drive itself, so I know exactly when I bought it.
Smart move.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Have you heard of them failing? I guess some could have problems with overheating in the confined space. They are just ordinary hard drives in a box with interface circuitry and a power supply. If you open the box you'll see that inside is just a standard SATA drive, and if you open the drive itself (which will kill it) you'll find it has one or more platters inside. In fact I believe you can buy the boxes separately and put a drive of your own choosing inside.

...Unless you're talking about solid-state drives. Some of those use more or less standard memory, with battery backup, though I think flash memory ones are becoming more common nowadays because of their cheapness.

I'd be much happier if we had more reliable storage systems. Even the best hard drives' mechanical systems don't last much beyond about 7 years of use. Thumb drives' memory cells die after about 100,000 read-write-erase cycles which, in general use tends to work out to around the same length of time, or maybe a little longer, depending on how often data is erased and rewritten on the flash drive. I think the flash cards in cameras have a greater number of read-write-erase cycles, around a million? though I'm not entirely sure. Writeable CDs and DVDs are almost a waste of time because they are so unreliable. I have some that were written only a few years ago that are now riddled with errors (though I also have some from about a decade ago that are still readable).

I wish I also wrote on a drive's body the company I bought it from too. [sigh] I can't locate a VISA transaction to match the date. I misspoke slightly before -- I record the date I put the drive into a computer, not actually the date I buy it. On occasion a drive can sit idly on my desk til I get time to put it in my computer, so the date written on the drive-case can lag by days, or even weeks, from the date I buy it. The date is really for my own interest so I know how long I've had it in use.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Have you heard of them failing?

USBs? Er... yes. Not actual people, but my Flist has mentioned it.

Even the best hard drives' mechanical systems don't last much beyond about 7 years of use.

Seven years ago I bought a 20GB drive for $300.
My main Windows machine's main drive is 8 years old now IIRC. Obviously I'm not too find of keeping vital stuff on it.

Writeable CDs and DVDs are almost a waste of time because they are so unreliable.

This is my sad face :(

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Maybe it is that people treat their external drives roughly. They are incredibly delicate machinery, and should not be moved when the disk is spinning because of the gyro forces on the bearings. I've noticed that many have pretty housings that don't allow air circulation. Even though newer drives run much cooler than previous drives, they do still warm up. My external drive has little rubber feet, which I'm thinking of replacing with thicker ones. I have a friend whose external drive is not isolated from vibration. I'm sure that reduces lifespan dramatically.

I hope the problem of long-term storage gets solved in my lifetime, but I really doubt capitalism is capable of it. I think it will come out of the open-source hardware movement, when that eventually gets going properly.

[thorfinn]

Buy an appropriate drobo unit.

http://drobo.com/ (main website)

http://mwave.com.au/ (Australian vendor)

They aren't cheap, but if you're concerned about data safety, they're great.

It's still not a backup - but it at least protects you against single disk failure. And single disks are guaranteed to fail at some point.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Ironically, that Mwave site isn't resolving, and I can't find any pricing anywhere, but if it's like Drobo, I'm guessing USB drives would be a cheaper option.

[thorfinn]

Cheaper, but no less prone to exactly the same issue as single disks.

Any single disk system is eventually going to fail.

As for mwave... bah. Stupid vendor website DNS. Better link:

http://www.mwave.com.au/

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... After looking through some pages on the Drobo site (the mwave one doesn't want to display), I'm still not entirely sure what they're selling... they seem to be quite coy about it. If it is RAID, I kind of considered that (am still considering it), but the down side is it effectively doubles the cost of disks. Drobo looks like it might be some kind of network drive solution which stores everything on more than one drive, like RAID, but using a network instead.

A networked system would work well for me because I could distribute the data among my computers. I should make something like that. I don't have the money to buy more than just disks (I barely have the money for them).

This gives me some ideas... hmmm... thanks David. I appreciate the pointer. It has set me thinking.

[thorfinn]

The drobo is consumer grade RAID5, single parity disk, no configuration and fiddling necessary, all disks hot swappable.

But, yes, you could definitely build your own software raid unix box to do the same sort of thing. More pain, but much less money. :-)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yes. The more pain [learning], but much less money option is far more appropriate to my income and my mindset -- I love learning more than anything. :)

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

I'll bet you the actual drive's fine, its the enclosure that's broken.

If you can't resurrect it by conventional means and warranty repair is synonymous with "we'll give you a new one", opening it and transplanting the drive elsewhere may work.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately this is the bare drive itself. It isn't an external drive. I've tried swapping it with another drive, which confirmed my diagnosis of dead. My only chance now is if I can swap over the circuit board on the drive with an identical one on another drive in the hope that the drive circuitry has died.

If it was an external drive pulling it out of the enclosure might well have worked. Thanks for the suggestion anyway, Annie. I appreciate ideas on anything I might have overlooked. I'd really be glad to be wrong on this. :/

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Is it worth trying a data recovery service?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I'm half considering that, though they are supposed to be incredibly expensive (hundreds of dollar, I believe... I should call one up to check).

Today has been spent sorting through oodles of directories of stuff. Luckily I habitually (obsessively) use redundancy on almost everything, so I have a lot of copies of stuff -- many more than I thought I had, which is a great relief. I have still lost a lot, but not quite as much as I'd thought. Some of the newer stuff was, I think, mostly books downloaded from the net. Most of those are on Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg Australia, Textbook Revolution, and BookBoon so can be downloaded again.

My newer CDs and DVDs can be ripped again -- time-consuming, but not a great problem.

I need to set aside funds for another backup drive. It is scary not having duplicate copies for so much of this stuff now.

I really need to learn more about S.M.A.R.T. drive technology. Most drives have it, but no operating system that I know of uses it as standard. There is this technology that can warn us when a drive is about to fail, but is mostly just out of reach. How stupid is that.

[thorfinn]

SMART doesn't really help you. Disks can and will just fail without any warning.

Any single point of failure is just that.

If you want a real backup, try: http://mozy.com/home/

Of course, it'll take a long time (and a lot of bandwidth) to back up everything, and catastrophic restore would be expensive (ship you a disk from the US, ouch), but if you're not backed up off site, you're not backed up.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

SMART increases the chances that data can be retrieved before things are irreversible, but point taken. Bad things can still happen suddenly and with little or no warning.

I must say I've been getting increasingly nervous about having everything here on one site. It is one of the reasons I'm growing more affectionate of external hard drives. I can pick them up and take them up to my folks' place and store them there. Every time bushfire season comes in I get the heebie-jeebies again.

There certainly is a lot to be said for off-site storage. And with Linux I could connect to my Folks' machine and still have access to my data from here.

Thanks David. You've really helped to push my mind along some neat directions. :)

[thorfinn]

Good good. :-) This is all tech that's been in the corporate world for some time (networked raid storage, filesystem snapshots for online backups, offsite storage for backups), but it's really starting to move into the reach of ordinary home users as the price drops towards the very cheap and in some cases free.

I highly recommend using Dropbox and MozyHome for really critical files in addition to doing your own raid + offsite backups. You get 2GB free, which is not a huge amount, but it's enough for really critical documents.

Sign up for dropbox using this link: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTIzMjE0NTM5

and you and I will both get an extra 250MB of free storage. :-)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I'll think on that. My data requirements tend to get a little heavy. The smallest area on my drives is the text directory which is almost 30GB in size. Other areas go way beyond that. My audio directory (music, radio recordings, downloaded talks, etc) almost 100GB. My Work folder is around the same size. Installs folder, where I keep all old (and new) software versions, just under 300GB. Video is totally nuts.

I could certainly use 2GB free storage for important stuff, but I can already do that with my website, with the advantage that if I want to let someone else have access I send them the link. And gmail has almost 3GB of free storage. Or I can keep stuff on my two 16GB thumbdrives (which saved me a lot of grief in this latest crash).

Paying $10 a month for 50GB doesn't sound like much money, but when you start adding up all the little things each that don't cost much, they end up eating all my available funds. [sigh]

Hard drive space is about 6GB per dollar now. For effectively $10 I can have 60GB of hard drive space for the life of the drive. If use use RAID or a software backup or mirror then 60GB+safety is $20 for some unknown number of years. If I keep those drives offsite (at my folks') then the only advantage dropbox offer is convenience... which admittedly is still an important advantage: an inconvenient solution tends not to get used, no matter how useful it is.

Thanks for the link, David. I will think more on it. I tend not to make quick decisions, as you can see. :)