Late-Night Musings on Hard Drive Reliability

[Bob Michaels]

The only price I remember was a new Compaq portable (luggable) with not just 128k but a full 256K of memory, not one but two floppy disk drives and DOS 1.2. We got them for dealer cost which was $2,450 because we bought ten at one time.

No problems with hard drive failures since there was not one.

Thanks to Lotus 1-2-3, that was the biggest productivity boost for the money spent before or ever since. Hit the F9 (recalculate) key and in ten seconds it would do what used to take me a full day and several rolls of adding machine tape to do.

 

[btgc]

I believe this days decent Linux distros read AND write NTFS partitions (ntfs3g/fuse).

I do not believe Windows are so bad that HDD could not live with them, though revived under Linux 🙂

Backups are good idea, and I should rush to make one of my pictures.

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.

 

[Bob Michaels]

Well, my HDD for my system at work crashed today. It had been spinning for at least a year but we had a power outage overnight that drained every UPS and all systems shut down. Network / Server guru was out of town but I managed to get everything up and running, except my own system.

My computer would not boot but just emitted the clicking sound of HDD heads bouncing off the disk.

Fortunately all my data is on the server which is backed up in multiple places. But I spent the better part of the remaining day setting up a new system so I could go back to work at my regular job.

It made me check my desk drawer to insure the external HDD with the copy of the back up of my home system was still there. My home system is backed up to an internal HDD, a disconnected external HDD and another external HDD kept 20 miles away at the office.

 

[lynnb]

I had a WD MyBook 500Gb external drive fail after around 2yrs. I'll see if a Linux machine can read it. Luckily I had mostly backed up to another external drive, but I still lost some images.
I'm running out of space now and was considering a Drobo, but maybe a more cost effective idea is to just buy a couple of 2Tb WD external drives. I use OSX and always use Lightroom to load new files onto 2 drives when uploading. This thread has been very informative.

 

[Steve M.]

I think you're on the right track sticking w/ WD. I have my photo files on my computer's internal HD, and on 2 backup external HD's (both WD). One of the drives is going on 6 years now, but still working like new. W/ triple redundancy I feel pretty safe, but will feel even better after I get all of my negs filed properly. At that point I don't care if all the hard drives fail because everything is going to be enlarger printed at that point, except for low rez web scans. It's taken me years to get to this point.

 

[amateriat]

Fred: I've seen all kinds of drives go belly-up in the past six months alone (around ten of 'em), including WD. Nonetheless, based on my before-mentioned "experience of averages", I'm trusting WD's before anyone else's for now. My main problem is selling more people on investing in a proper backup system, which truly costs chump-change right now.

And, IMO, I only see three somewhat-trustworthy companies making drives right now (WD, Hitachi, and Seagate, roughly in my own order of importance/trustworthiness).

(Damn...is this really my 4,200th post here?)


- Barrett

 

[kknox]

My HD quit in my laptop last month, good thing my most of my stuff was backed up. What are we all going to do in 40yrs to get all these photos off hard drives? Hope we can find a 40 year old PC to plug them all into that still works. It will be like tying to find a light bulb for your dads silde projector to see all your Kodachromes. Or your dads 8mm movies. What are we all going to do?