Late-Night Musings on Hard Drive Reliability

amateriat

amateriat

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Well, I'm up this late (4:20AM EST) because, several hours ago, one of the four internal hard drives in my late-model Power Mac G4 tower started coughing up a hairball or two. It's the second-oldest drive in there, and was slated for replacement mid-summer, but it's acting like it wants out now. It's rather inconvenient, because I'm in the middle of recovering data from the hard drives of two clients, one of whose drives is in truly dire straits (I'll likely have to leave it on for a bunch of hours in the hope that it'll mount: I'm getting some sleep in order to get to the RFf NYC meet-up later in today).

I've watched a lot of drives self-destruct over the last year. Here are a few back-of-the-envelope observations:

- Maxtor drives truly, honestly bite. I used to gripe about older Seagate HDs prematurely croaking, but Maxtors seem hearty if they make it past two years of age. I've already had to deal with two 750GB externals getting funky; I was able to save one, while the other one is here in Tiny Atelier, making ominous clicking noises.

- S.M.A.R.T. technology is stupid. Of all the dead-or-near-dying HDs I've come across, I'd say about 15% displayed failing SMART status on diagnosis. The others clicked, clacked, wheezed and shuddered without SMART showing a peep o' trouble. This is supposed to be an early-warning system in the event of impending doom. This dog hardly has a pulse, let alone hunts.

- I've had an semi-official policy of replacing hard drives after 3.5 to 4 years' use. I'm rather tempted to pull that back to 2.5-3 years, which I'll also be recommending to my clients, who likely won't be thrilled with the news. Between vastly-increased capacity and commodity-cheap prices, I'm wondering what the QC on these drives is like now, compared with 5-6 years ago. Maybe those "enterprise-class" drives are screwed together better, and with better components? (The MTBF specs are better, for what that's worth.)

- I've seen a fair number of fried power adapters for external drives lately, including my own 1TB LaCie NAS drive that backs up all the computers in the household. I'm thinking even good-quality "protected" power strips aren't enough. Time for a UPS, maybe?

- By process of elimination, I'm using only Western Digital drives now...in the tower, in the PowerBook, as an external drive for the tower (2TB Studio drive), in the small portable drives I carry on my tech gigs. No surprises in the three years I've been using them. (The one internal drive giving me hiccups is–you guessed it, a 300GB Maxtor.)

- Maxtor was absorbed by Seagate some time back. Misery loves company?

- The Maxtor gets replaced with a 500GB WD next week. (PATA...yes, it's the "old" ATA, but I'm not in the mood to buy a SATA card for the G4 at the moment, as I only have one PCI slot left in the Mac, and I'm saving it for something else...)

- If you shoot digital, make sure you actually transferred your images, intact, to your Main Iron's HD before triple-formatting your card and sticking it back in your camera. A client of mine didn't, and I couldn't get his images back from the card for love or money. Just one reason I still shoot film at least 75% of the time. Film ain't perfect here, either, but I prefer the odds.

- When you install a hard drive in anything, make a note of the purchase and installation date. Keep it in a handy place.

- Don't operate high-current-draw equipment (i.e. vacuum-cleaners) while your computer is in the process of a mission-critical chore, especially if the equipment is on the same line. Do not ask me how I know this.

- Run disk-checks at least every other week.

- If you insist, look into off-site storage such as Mozy or the like. Unless you have Synchronous DSL (or its cable-borne equivalent), brace yourself for some long backup times the first time out. I prefer the idea of a monthly backup on an external drive, then dropping it into a safe-deposit box not too far away. But that's just me.

- Trust me about the SMART issue.

That's all, folks.


- Barrett
 
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All my computers run on UPS, and my writing computers use solid-state storage rather than HD. Something that surprised me is that the UK has (or had) the most reliable power supply of anywhere I have lived, with rural France a (poor) second and rural California (Central Coast) a very significantly poorer third.

Cheers,

R.
 
dfoo: I'll check SpinRite out. I use a few other recovery apps with varying success. I'm primarily a Mac user, but I do have a late-model HP tower running Vista Home Premium, so I can load and run SpinRite on that (good to know it'll handle Mac-formatted disks so long as I lash 'em to the HP). Thanks for the tip.

Roger: No, the grid here in the States isn't quite what it should be (or used to be, for that matter). Of course, the "mains" in my place is/are fairly reliable, allowing that the brownstone I'm living in was built sometime around 1895, with some of the original wiring (obviously installed a bit later) still intact and in use, though much of it, thankfully, has been replaced.

So, do you mean to tell me the electrics where you are now aren't exactly the best?


- Barrett
 
All hdd's are guaranteed to fail. It's just a matter of when. 🙁

I don't have much overlap between photography and computers fortunately, but nevertheless my home-built pc's all use RAID of some sort. I don't have a power-conditioner or UPS of any sort - that might be a good idea for the future, though it seems pretty reliable here. Except for that time half of holland was out, or when the local transformer leaked coolant and blew up etc. etc.
 
Well, it looks like the drive simply has a few bad sectors, so I'm running an app to map them out (one sector was smack in the middle of an image file I dearly wanted to print, of course). I managed to copy everything else from that partition (I have four partitions on that drive) to an external drive temporarily. Two of the remaining three partitions, including my large-ish iTunes collection, were automatically backed up earlier as a matter of course.

Now I'll try and catch a bit of sleep while the Mac dukes it out with that misbehaving drive. Thankfully, the RFf meet-up isn't until a bit before 3, so I can get a bit of shut-eye in.


- Barrett
 
I got tired of all the USB drives and limitations of simple NAS devices and decided to try a Windows Home Server running on a UPS. So far it has been great.

It has very efficient , raid-like data replication across multiple drives using any size drives (like JBOD), Shadow coping of files for version history, and automatic monitoring and nightly backups of all machines on your network - if your virus software is out of date or a backup hasn't completed for a number of days, you will see a tray alert on every machine. There is a healthy cottage industry for plugins - for media streaming, managing the box and UPS email warnings, etc. I do backup the data on the WHS to a separate USB drive.

The only downside for me is that I built mine from scratch and it can't integrate my Mac seamlessly. If you buy an HP WHS, they have Mac compatible client software to automatically backup Macs.

My other seriously considered option was a DROBO, but the WHS has much greater capabilities, is faster, and cheaper implement.
 
In my experience spinrite will recover your drive, unless the drive has had some sort of mechanical failure. If you run spinrite in maintenance mode, it will keep the drives in good shape by scanning every sector of the drive thereby "refreshing" the data. I know it sounds magical, but there are good technical reasons why that is a good idea 🙂
 
amateriat said:
dfoo: I'll check SpinRite out. I use a few other recovery apps with varying success. I'm primarily a Mac user, but I do have a late-model HP tower running Vista Home Premium, so I can load and run SpinRite on that (good to know it'll handle Mac-formatted disks so long as I lash 'em to the HP). Thanks for the tip.

Roger: No, the grid here in the States isn't quite what it should be (or used to be, for that matter). Of course, the "mains" in my place is/are fairly reliable, allowing that the brownstone I'm living in was built sometime around 1895, with some of the original wiring (obviously installed a bit later) still intact and in use, though much of it, thankfully, has been replaced.

So, do you mean to tell me the electrics where you are now aren't exactly the best?


- Barrett
Click to expand...

Dear Barrett,

Not as such.

'As such' was a phrase in common use at ICL (Internatonal Computers Limited, the leading UK mainframe computer company) when I worked there in the early 80s, as in, "Can you run this under VME/K?" -- "Not as such." (i.e. 'at all'). Actually the house wiring, probably installed between 1945 and 1990 in a house built and subsequenty modified between maybe 1400 and 1975, is not too bad (though woefully inadequate in extent). But power cuts and brownouts are several more common than in the UK, though several times more reliable than California.

Cheers,

R.
 
Multiple backups - I use Time Capsule - which IMHO sucks due to the sparse bundle file system, but hasn't failed on me lately. I also make rsync copies of my home directory and archive off items that take too much space and I never use (once watched shows and movies). if a drive starts making funny sounds - back it up immediately , refined hearing has saved me a couple times.
 
All my drives are WD, wouldn't have any other brand. My main workstation has two 8-year old WD drives in it, yes I have backup - I use Retrospect - great program. I just replaced a croaked IBM Travelstar 30GB in a laptop that had been hammered for seven years with a $70 160GB WD drive. Wonder how long that's going to last? Not seven years I bet.
 
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.

Pies in the USA would usually be called tarts in English (being open faced, with a bottom crust only) and are often inedibly sweet unless you were brought up eating them.

Then again, proper mustard is, indeed, hot as mustard. American mustard, by contrast, is commonly sweet as custard.

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger Hicks said:
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.

Pies in the USA would usually be called tarts in English (being open faced, with a bottom crust only) and are often inedibly sweet unless you were brought up eating them.

Then again, proper mustard is, indeed, hot as mustard. American mustard, by contrast, is commonly sweet as custard.
Click to expand...

Roger, it's not nearly as "simple" as that! Where I live, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_cream_pie is a pie -- and where Barrett lives, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_pie is. 😀
 
Lots of great tips here. Yes, SMART is generally not very helpful. I mainly use its protocol for reading the temperature off of the drive to make sure nothing is wildly out of whack. If I have two of the same drives in a case and one is at 37C and the other is at 50C, something's going on with the drive or the air circulation.

Personal experience, I only go three years on a drive. The drive in my Thinkpad made it only two...it started getting read/write errors, and I was lucky enough to image it in entirety to a new drive.

Internet backup is not feasible for me as it would take forever on my 1mbit upload limit. So I do whole image backups to a local drive every week or so. I really like the process, as it's about the fastest to get you up and running again if you have a problem. Drive failure? Just pull the drive, put in a new one, copy the backup image to the new drive and you're up and running. I like Acronis, but there are other image programs out there, including native ones in Win7.
 
FYI I have had 3 western digital drives die on me within the last two years. They always seem to die fast. I only use the seagates now and had great luck with maxtors. In fact the first "upgrade" maxtor 40 gb HDD I bought for my old 533mhz Celeron way back in the day still works! Its at least 7-8 years old now...
 
batterytypehah! said:
Roger, it's not nearly as "simple" as that! Where I live, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_cream_pie is a pie -- and where Barrett lives, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_pie is. 😀
Click to expand...

Ah, but a pizza is in fact a savoury tart. Or, depending on the ingredients and cooks, an unsavoury tart.

@ Doublenegative: My father's younger sister, my aunt Margaret, was actually known as Fanny as a young woman. When my parents were married in '48, she was a very tall teenager, and my war-widow grandmother was reportedly heard to say mournfully, "Where am I going to find a man big enough for my Fanny?"

Then there's a grower of herbs in France, selling their produce under the name of "Le Jardin de Fanny" (Fanny's garden).

Cheers,

R.
 
Avotius said:
FYI I have had 3 western digital drives die on me within the last two years. They always seem to die fast. I only use the seagates now and had great luck with maxtors. In fact the first "upgrade" maxtor 40 gb HDD I bought for my old 533mhz Celeron way back in the day still works! Its at least 7-8 years old now...
Click to expand...
I guess it just goes to show: I've seen virtually every brand of hard drive go bellyu-up at some time or other, and, as MartinP put it, they'll all croak sooner or later. It's just that, strictly from my experience, WD's drives have worked out better. Seagate also had a rash of bum 500GB drives that Apple spec'd for the previous-generation iMacs, and caused a lot of hoots n' hollers in the Internets. (If I had $10 for every time I had to explain "Apple didn't make those drives, Seagate did", I'd be close to owning a loaded Mac Pro right now.)

I did have a 160GB Maxtor that seemed well-nigh indestructible for a while...


- Barrett
 
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