Second one in two weeks. This time it's my 1.5Tb disk with all my photos from the last three years. Thank goodness for backups! Going to take ages to restore it all though.
Looks like I've had another HDD fail
Related Posts
13 Comments
Leave A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Ouch! – Thanks goodness indeed!
Thats not good Ian, perhaps change the brand of drive,
Two different brands of drives one was 2.5in drive that I use with my laptop. The 1.5Tb one was a 3.5in drive on the home system. Just a co-incidence I think. I've gone many years without any failures so I guess I was overdue!
Sounds like Ian, good work on having it all backed up
Feel for you… my PC, scanner AND monitor all died in 7 days… lost the HDD and all on it…
Hmmm… did an experiment overnight. Swapped the "dead" with it's backup disk. Now the backup drive appears to have failed but the master disk is ok. It's beginning to look like the problem is with the SATA disk controller and not the disk. Not sure if this is good news or not!
Time to do some diagnostics. Take the side of the computer, and swap the SATA data cables over to see which (if any disk) disappears from the system…. run some backups and move some files around to make sure the disks are in use. Next update… when it fails!
Ian have you considered an external raid system, drobo etc good protection against drive failure
A friend and fellow tog has this and was impessed with it's ease of use and features – might be worth a look;
QNAP TS-210 NAS Server
http://www.amazon.co.uk/QNAP-TS-210-Server-iPhone-Streaming/dp/B002SD71FO/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1312188471&sr=1-1
I wouldn't touch RAID with a barge pole! RAID is fine for server farms and computer rooms, but lower budget implementations are less reliable. I've read/heard so many stories about people who have used RAID in a home setting and found that when one disk has failed they have actually loose everything in the set. The classic one is a mirrored pair – where in some cases it isn't possible to 'break the mirror' when one of the disks fails. Also the problem with RAID solutions is that corrupted/damaged/overwritten files are just mirrored/copied to the other disks in the set.
Here's my solution…. I use external USB hard drives to back up my disks. For each disk I have TWO external backup drives, one is permanently connected to the PC and the other off site. Every so often I swap over the connected disk with the off site one. On the PC I run a program called "ViceVersa" (see http://www.tgrmn.com) to copy any modified files over to the connected backup drive. ViceVersa is scheduled to run as a background task on my PC every few hours using VVEngine (another product from tgrmn software). Every day or so I just keep an eye on the logs to make sure it is running without errors. Using this solution means that the backup drives are simple copies of the master disk and I can simply access the backup like any other disk – or even just plug the backup drive where the master used to be and carry on.
Will check vice versa out sounds a useful prog!
Not sure how your system eliminates copying bad or corrupted data to your other drives!
Worrying the stories you have heard about with the raid systems, as far as I am aware it is the best protection against a single drive failure the issue of copying damaged files etc is one of integrity from the original file and is not a consequence of using a raid system.
The mirrored example is worrying, as each mirrored drive should operate as an independant drive in its own right.
Its all about what works for you Ian, and if the system you have in place works then you would be right to stay with that.
Hi Terry, the vice versa software 'archives' any file it is about to overwrite in the backup (to a separate disk in my case). You can then say how long you want to keep those archive files for and how many versions. I have mine set to keep them for 2 months and to keep 5 versions I think. So long as I spot the corrupt file/overwrite within 2 months I'm ok. Also because I have both on site and off site backups there is always a good chance that any missing file might still be on the older off site disks.
I agree that RAID is supposed to be the best way to go, and I used RAID 5 arrays all the time when I worked in IT. Even then though we had the odd problem with them when a single disk failed.
Here's an interesting page…
http://www.adrc.com/raid_failure_types.html
That lists different ways RAID can fail. I saw a couple of those in my time in IT!
Thanks Ian will read through that later on today.
Im using radi5 on an external so will be very interested in this article.