Late-Night Musings on Hard Drive Reliability

[Richard Ross]

Years ago there was an English TV chef called Fanny Craddock. She had a weekly show with husband Johnny, who once uttered the immortal words "tune in next week when you can see how to make donuts like Fanny's" ...

Richard

 

[MartinP]

There was a good point made about using workstation grade disk-drives. Remember that most pre-built computers are built down to a price and many disk-drive manufacturers have a double range, or at least some cheaper models, to get in to that mass market while having a guarantee of only months or a year.

It is always a prudent plan to seek out and buy from the range of drives with a longer warranty and higher quality - even if they might be more conservative (ie.slower or smaller) in design.

Rsync gets my vote too btw. 🙂

 

[Frank Petronio]

I can't believe you wouldn't use a UPS in Brooklyn! Start there.

Personally I just buy a new external Firewire HD every year, backing up my daily stuff onto this year and last year's drives. The two and three year old drives hold less up to date but contain crucial archival back-ups off site.

I just buy consumer level externals. I have grown to distrust LaCies and favor WD MyBooks. $224 for a 2tb w Firewire 800 -- about the same as what the 1tb cost last year. Right now I back up 900gb, so at this schedule I should have twin 2 tb drives when I crest the 1 tb threshold at the end of this year.

Laptop HD prices have plummeted so I am swapping out my MacBook Pro's 120 gb for 500 gb, putting the old 120 gb into a cheap USB external case. I'll take this and another small external on road trips for BU.

Trying Time Machine next, at least for my wife's computer.

I have tried Image Shelter for online management, rationalizing it made more sense than using endless external drives, but it is SLOW and the policies and viability of these companies can change things at anytime, as I sadly learned after spending two weeks setting myself up to sell Stock via Image Shelter only to have them pull the plug on that aspect of their venture with only a couple weeks warning.

Finally, part of the reason I post a lot of photos here and a few other sites is because if the worst happened, I'd still be able to pull enough 600-pixel images to make a useful online portfolio ;-)

 

[oftheherd]

UPS is always a good idea. Make sure (as I think most are now) it is one that runs off the battery at all times. Strips may OK if they have the proper components, and you can get inside to replace failed or damaged components after a lightning strike. They help with transients from things like vacumn cleaners, but not completely. The UPS with a large battery is better.

Be careful of flash drives. They will probably go bad with use faster than a hard drive, even those which have a technology to randomize the memory locations used.

 

[bwcolor]

Between my business and home I'm running close to twenty computers and many TB of drives. I will not buy Maxtor and have concluded that enterprise level Western Digital drives are my best bet and all critical information is backed-up by three separate software programs with two on-site and one off-site. I have had many drives fail without warning and have had two backups overwritten when employees try to recover their own mistakes and end up making things much worse. One important tip; always have one backup that nobody, but you knows about.

 

[Benjamin Marks]

Hard-drive gurus: I have been running weekly backups to an internal drive and monthly back-ups to an external drive that just sits, unpowered when not in use. Every six months, a large drive goes to an off site location. I'm generating between 750 GB and 1 TB per year in data, so this has been a relatively inexpensive way to keep things backed up. Am I correct in assuming that MTBF numbers are for hours when the drive is actually running?

BTW: in Vermont, with country-DSL the "cloud" might as well be the Small Magellanic Cloud for all I have access to it.

 

[oftheherd]

Just me, but I don't think public cloud; or even commercial has acheived the security needed.

 

[dfoo]

What manner of trust? If the issue is trust not to use/read the data then encrypt it.

 

[ErnestoJL]

Back in 1996 when a 3.6 Gb drive was a real big one, I bought a couple of Seagates. S/N were about 50 units apart on each other. They died in 2006 one week apart from each other. They were replaced with a single one of 80 Gb (Samsung) which died four years later, Didn´t mind just because was a drive a friend of mine used for backing up customer drives, and BTW it was a gift.
My Toshiba laptop came with a Toshiba Phillipines made 40Gb drive which lasted about two years. It was replaced by a 160 Gb Samsung about a year ago. This drive crashed three weeks before today, so I´m looking for a decent replacement.
Wonder if any of the present drives on the market would perform as those old Seagates I had, even having no blackouts nor brownouts since the last ten years here.
Today I decided that all my picture files (and other important files) will be saved on 4GB (or bigger) SD cards. Those that can be read by any home computer.
Wonder if any of those cards would last as old negs I have, some more than 50 years old.
Ernesto

 

[Frank Petronio]

I don't see where the flash cards are so reliable - they are just faster and more expensive. They may withstand shock better, but digital photographers have their cards - SD and CF - fail all the time.

 

[imokruok]

I don't see where the flash cards are so reliable - they are just faster and more expensive. They may withstand shock better, but digital photographers have their cards - SD and CF - fail all the time.

Absolutely true, and acute failure is only one way they can die. Data retention in solid state memory still isn't very good. I mentioned in a similar thread a few months back that people are starting to test data that was stored on some of the original SSDs 4-5 years ago. It's full of errors. In contrast, I can still pull Word files off of a SCSI hard drive that was in my Mac 20+ years ago.

 

[wgerrard]

Two nations divided by a common language...

Pies in the UK are normally savoury and have either a top and a bottom crust or just a top crust. A pork pie with mustard and a mug of cider is a particular delight. Of course there are sweet pies too (e.g. blackberry and apple) but they still have a top crust.


R.

For some reason, apple pie over here almost always has a top crust, and is often quite thick. Suspect it's due to German influence. Fruit pies usually don't, and strawberry pie is often just a big pile of strawberries and sweet red gelation thrown into a crust and smothered with whipped cream. Hardly merits being called pie or tart, but if the strawberries are actually ripe, it's good.

Speaking of sweet, I bought a bourbon chocolate pecan pie not long ago. A guaranteed sugar high.

I seem to recall the UK lacks in the cookie department.

 

[flip]

The great thing about HDD failures: you learn to notice the signs and recognize which you can live with for a little longer and which require an immediate newegg purchase.

My $.02 is that it also makes a good case for a bootable linux OS of some sort. Exceptionally good at reading data from otherwise challenged drives.

 

[Bob Michaels]

The aforementioned MFM/RLL drives are all but history.

If anyone has a mid-80's MFM 10 Mb hard drive for a IBM PC (ST225 or even a 125, as I remember) I would be interested. I upgraded mine to a RLL 20 Mb drive in the late 80's and would like to go back to the original.

I have a AST 640K memory expansion card, fully loaded with memory chips to trade. I will just take it back to the original 256K of memory that it came with.

Sorry I let the 8087 math co-processor chip go back back in the late 80's. But when someone offered me $100 for it, I could not refuse the money. I probably got 75 rolls of film with that $100.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

The St225 was a half-height, 20MByte drive. I thought RLL was 30MBytes. I think the last of my MFM drives packed it up. I had a 40MByte and 20MByte full-height for the longest time. I'll look in the basement.

I had a 5MByte FM drive for the microcomputers.

My oldest working hard drive at work is 1993. 1GByte. I keep two drives in the machine, back it up a good bit. The older, less dense drives are more reliable. I have a 1992 SCSI 2.5" notebook drive in the Kodak DCS200, 80MBytes. Holds 50 pictures. Still works.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Nope- the ST225 is dead.

I do have some old stuff, a 1984 IBM Professional Graphics Controller, 640x480, 256 colors and the Monitor to go with it. $6K originally. Microsoft Word 6.0 for DOS. The oldest machine I keep running is a Pentium Pro with IDE drives, WIN95B. However, the Xerox 820-II with its 5.25" drives booted the last time I checked a few years ago. It is almost 30 years old. The Atari 400 still works.

 

[Bob Michaels]

Brian: you are probably right. Maybe it was the ST 125 that was the 10Mb drive. And the RLL drive was 30 mb. I have not booted the machine in decades. I cannot remember now if it came with a 10 Mb or 20 Mb drive. Who ever thought someone would ever need to store that much data anyway.

It was a strictly functional machine. No fancy RGB card and monitor, strictly monochrome.

If you come across a working 10Mb or 20 Mb drive, keep me in mind.

BTW, I do have shrink wrapped copy of DOS 2.3 to take it back to the original OS.

I have thrown away 286, 386 and 486 machines but kept this one because it is an original IBM. I was hoping that some day it may be worth something as a collector's item. But I don't think that has happened yet.

 

[peter_n]

I have a Wang 8086 PC in my office. Much better machine... 😉

 

[dfoo]

Damn, that was big bucks back in the day. My first PC had an 8086 with a turbo button. From 4.77 to 8Mhz! (not Ghz, Mhz). I later upgraded the memory to 640, and installed the math co-processor. Man, speed! Ironically enough, given the subject matter in this thread I later found out about HD failures, when the HD in that box (all 20M of it) failed and I lost all my data.

 

[oftheherd]

...

My $.02 is that it also makes a good case for a bootable linux OS of some sort. Exceptionally good at reading data from otherwise challenged drives.

My daughter's fiance told me he had a laptop in college that developed a hard drive problem, and began losing data and making noise. He switched to Linux and no more problems. And yes, the later versions of linux will read all MS disks, so a live distro for recovery is a good idea.