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]

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.