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My half-full terabyte external hard drive seems to have died. I opened
the case and there doesn't seem to be anything visibly wrong with the
drive, and it was working just fine earlier today (even ran a checkdisk
to be sure)...it just doesn't spin up when powered on. Hopefully it's
just the enclosure. Have ordered a new one, which will arrive in two or
so days.
Will be *most* put out if the drive itself is dead, though losing a
little over a year's worth of data and effort at organising things isn't
as bad as eight years'.
--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net
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Tim Cook wrote:
> Will be *most* put out if the drive itself is dead,
Eventually you'll learn to buy two. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Darren New wrote:
> Tim Cook wrote:
>> Will be *most* put out if the drive itself is dead,
>
> Eventually you'll learn to buy two. :-)
Well said - guess there isn't a convenient modality for backing up 500GB of
data?
I've lost count how many times I've had to fall back to backups. Saved my
ass quite a few times...!
Greatest one was when I was working in a dispatching center for fire /
emergency. We had tens of thousands of patient and incident records on file
(in a custom developed Unix-based system) and up to five years or more
after the fact, firemen and paramedics could be called to testify in a
court about a shooting / rape / assault / fatal house fire, etc. Then they
would want records - accurate records - of times, who attended, what was
logged, etc. Failure to produce such could land you in contempt of court.
No less than FIVE times during my seven year career there, -I- could have
conceivably gone to jail for NOT having the records the court demanded - if
I had NOT made backups...!
But then, then volumes weren't at your level. Good luck in getting the drive
working!
--
Stefan Viljoen
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> My half-full terabyte external hard drive seems to have died. I opened
> the case and there doesn't seem to be anything visibly wrong with the
> drive, and it was working just fine earlier today (even ran a checkdisk to
> be sure)...it just doesn't spin up when powered on. Hopefully it's just
> the enclosure. Have ordered a new one, which will arrive in two or so
> days.
What connector does the actual drive have? Can you plug that directly into
a desktop PC?
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Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> guess there isn't a convenient modality for backing up 500GB of data?
There is - but not for sane prices, no.
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:16:44 +0000, Invisible wrote:
> Stefan Viljoen wrote:
>
>> guess there isn't a convenient modality for backing up 500GB of data?
>
> There is - but not for sane prices, no.
A 1.5 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive costs a mere $95 from newegg.
I guess that arguably is an insane price - insanely cheap.
Jim
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>>> guess there isn't a convenient modality for backing up 500GB of data?
>> There is - but not for sane prices, no.
>
> A 1.5 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive costs a mere $95 from newegg.
>
> I guess that arguably is an insane price - insanely cheap.
I don't know, man... Backing up spinning disk to... spinning disk? Is
that such a sensible idea?
(Then again, I don't have any hard data on the reliability of HD verses
tape verses CD. I've heard that spinning HD up and down wears it out
faster than keeping it spinning, but I don't know if that's true...)
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:27:31 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>>>> guess there isn't a convenient modality for backing up 500GB of data?
>>> There is - but not for sane prices, no.
>>
>> A 1.5 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive costs a mere $95 from newegg.
>>
>> I guess that arguably is an insane price - insanely cheap.
>
> I don't know, man... Backing up spinning disk to... spinning disk? Is
> that such a sensible idea?
Mirroring (or duplexing) provides a pretty good degree of data protection
because the odds of both drives dying at the same time are pretty small.
It's been used for a very long time.
But I also back up directories from several systems to other systems
using rsync.
> (Then again, I don't have any hard data on the reliability of HD verses
> tape verses CD. I've heard that spinning HD up and down wears it out
> faster than keeping it spinning, but I don't know if that's true...)
Well, I didn't say anything about shutting the drive down.
Jim
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:27:31 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>
>>>>> guess there isn't a convenient modality for backing up 500GB of data?
>>>> There is - but not for sane prices, no.
>>>
>>> A 1.5 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive costs a mere $95 from newegg.
>>>
>>> I guess that arguably is an insane price - insanely cheap.
>>
>> I don't know, man... Backing up spinning disk to... spinning disk? Is
>> that such a sensible idea?
I do this daily, the thing is it is spinning disks on separate servers, from
different manufacturers, on different operating systems, each of the disks
being of different age since purchase... I'm sure you see how spreading the
risk applies, and thus increasing the percentage change of a backup
surviving.
> But I also back up directories from several systems to other systems
> using rsync.
Me too - works well.
>> (Then again, I don't have any hard data on the reliability of HD verses
>> tape verses CD. I've heard that spinning HD up and down wears it out
>> faster than keeping it spinning, but I don't know if that's true...)
>
> Well, I didn't say anything about shutting the drive down.
I've seen this phenomenon on older drives. Had a HDD in a system here that
was left on for years, probably been turned off 20 or 30 times in its
useful life. The fortieth or forty-fifth time the server was turned off,
the HDD died - after running reliably (while not being turned off, ever)
for 5 or 6 years. Ok, old hardware and an old drive, but just goes to show.
Keep 'em spinning is better than spin-up / spin-down on a daily basis.
--
Stefan Viljoen
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>> I don't know, man... Backing up spinning disk to... spinning disk? Is
>> that such a sensible idea?
>
> Mirroring (or duplexing) provides a pretty good degree of data protection
> because the odds of both drives dying at the same time are pretty small.
>
> It's been used for a very long time.
This is not the same as a backup.
RAID will protect you from physical failure of a single drive. It will
not protect you if you accidentally delete a file, or if some virus
infects your PC and deletes your stuff, or if the filesystem becomes
corrupted somehow, or...
> But I also back up directories from several systems to other systems
> using rsync.
Now that's more like it.
> Well, I didn't say anything about shutting the drive down.
An often-encountered backup strategy is to copy everything onto an
external USB HD and then put that somewhere. I'm not sure that all this
turning the drive on and off won't just wear it out faster.
PS. I've yet to find a consumer RAID controller which actually works
properly. They all seem to be hopelessly unreliable. And most of them
are software RAID anyway; the controller is a normal IDE or SATA
controller, and the Windows driver does all the actual RAID functions in
software. It seems that only the £££ server-grade controllers actually
do the job properly.
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:42:48 +0200, Stefan Viljoen wrote:
>>> (Then again, I don't have any hard data on the reliability of HD
>>> verses tape verses CD. I've heard that spinning HD up and down wears
>>> it out faster than keeping it spinning, but I don't know if that's
>>> true...)
>>
>> Well, I didn't say anything about shutting the drive down.
>
> I've seen this phenomenon on older drives. Had a HDD in a system here
> that was left on for years, probably been turned off 20 or 30 times in
> its useful life. The fortieth or forty-fifth time the server was turned
> off, the HDD died - after running reliably (while not being turned off,
> ever) for 5 or 6 years. Ok, old hardware and an old drive, but just goes
> to show. Keep 'em spinning is better than spin-up / spin-down on a daily
> basis.
I don't know, I've got a drive that I take to the office with me about
every 2 weeks. It sits at home off usually (unless I need something off
of it). It's actually 2 500 GB drives in an enclosure that Maxtor sold
about 4 years ago now.
I bought two of 'em.
One stayed plugged in 24x7 for 3 years and then it croaked - most likely
a head crash. The other has had periodic use for 5 years and shows no
signs of slowing down.
Of course the first showed no signs of slowing down either - right up to
the minute that it croaked.
Jim
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:42:27 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>>> I don't know, man... Backing up spinning disk to... spinning disk? Is
>>> that such a sensible idea?
>>
>> Mirroring (or duplexing) provides a pretty good degree of data
>> protection because the odds of both drives dying at the same time are
>> pretty small.
>>
>> It's been used for a very long time.
>
> This is not the same as a backup.
>
> RAID will protect you from physical failure of a single drive. It will
> not protect you if you accidentally delete a file, or if some virus
> infects your PC and deletes your stuff, or if the filesystem becomes
> corrupted somehow, or...
It depends a lot on what you're trying to protect yourself from. There's
nothing, though, that says you can't create a mirrored set, let the
drives mirror, and then "break the mirror" and take one drive offline.
I've known people who have done that and used that for disaster recovery
when upgrading systems.
>> But I also back up directories from several systems to other systems
>> using rsync.
>
> Now that's more like it.
>
>> Well, I didn't say anything about shutting the drive down.
>
> An often-encountered backup strategy is to copy everything onto an
> external USB HD and then put that somewhere. I'm not sure that all this
> turning the drive on and off won't just wear it out faster.
See my anecdotal evidence in reply to Stefan. Two identical units, one
powered on and off regularly, one that was left on 24x7. Guess which one
failed? Not the one that has been turned on and off regularly for 5
years now. The one that was plugged in and running for 3 years solid.
> PS. I've yet to find a consumer RAID controller which actually works
> properly. They all seem to be hopelessly unreliable. And most of them
> are software RAID anyway; the controller is a normal IDE or SATA
> controller, and the Windows driver does all the actual RAID functions in
> software. It seems that only the £££ server-grade controllers actually
> do the job properly.
Software raid exists for some platforms - and for mirroring for backup
purposes, that's really all you need. Heck, you could do it over iSCSI
with a fast enough connection (I've seen that done as well).
Jim
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scott wrote:
> What connector does the actual drive have? Can you plug that directly
> into a desktop PC?
That's the first thing I checked--but it's that newfangled eSATA stuff,
and housemate's computer is ordinary EIDE with normal power connections.
--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net
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Invisible wrote:
>>>> guess there isn't a convenient modality for backing up 500GB of data?
>>> There is - but not for sane prices, no.
>>
>> A 1.5 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive costs a mere $95 from newegg.
You mean TB, mayhaps?
>> I guess that arguably is an insane price - insanely cheap.
>
> I don't know, man... Backing up spinning disk to... spinning disk? Is
> that such a sensible idea?
>
> (Then again, I don't have any hard data on the reliability of HD verses
> tape verses CD. I've heard that spinning HD up and down wears it out
> faster than keeping it spinning, but I don't know if that's true...)
As for myself, I've never had much luck with optical media. Trust them
way less than hard drives. But I'm planning on getting a new desktop at
the end of the month with 2x1 TB and was going to use this external
drive as the backup for *that* (until I need a second one)...
As I said, I *hope* it's just the enclosure that croaked, and the drive
itself is just fine.
If it's not...I dunno. Data recovery places are expensive, and I don't
know if I can justify $1000+ even on the ~year's worth of data I had, at
the moment. How time-critical are these kinds of things? Can I just
keep it and when I have more money in a few months send it to a data
recovery place, if I can't get it working myself?
--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net
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>> I don't know, man... Backing up spinning disk to... spinning disk? Is
>> that such a sensible idea?
>>
>> (Then again, I don't have any hard data on the reliability of HD
>> verses tape verses CD. I've heard that spinning HD up and down wears
>> it out faster than keeping it spinning, but I don't know if that's
>> true...)
>
> As for myself, I've never had much luck with optical media. Trust them
> way less than hard drives.
Depends. We have a batch of archive CDs which have all gone unreadable.
We have other, much older CDs (like ten years older) which are still
readable to this day. Seems to depend on how cheap the disks are.
> As I said, I *hope* it's just the enclosure that croaked, and the drive
> itself is just fine.
>
> If it's not...I dunno. Data recovery places are expensive, and I don't
> know if I can justify $1000+ even on the ~year's worth of data I had, at
> the moment. How time-critical are these kinds of things? Can I just
> keep it and when I have more money in a few months send it to a data
> recovery place, if I can't get it working myself?
If it's a mechanical fault, every single time you try to turn the thing
on, you could be doing more damange and destroying more data.
If it's just an electrical fault, it's probably not time-critical at
all. (Although I imagine getting replacement parts gets harder - but
then depends on how long ago the drive was manufactured, not how long
ago it failed.)
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:42:48 +0200, Stefan Viljoen wrote:
>
> Of course the first showed no signs of slowing down either - right up to
> the minute that it croaked.
>
> Jim
The way of the world*
* By William Congreve - premiered 1700
--
Best Regards,
Stephen
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:42:27 +0000, Invisible wrote:
> See my anecdotal evidence in reply to Stefan. Two identical units, one
> powered on and off regularly, one that was left on 24x7. Guess which one
> failed? Not the one that has been turned on and off regularly for 5
> years now. The one that was plugged in and running for 3 years solid.
Hmm... well, no contest there. I guess there can be other factors involved
besides on / off frequency then? My personal experience with server-grade
hardware I've worked with differs though. It does seem (at least in my
personal experience) that turning HDD's on and off less makes them last
longer. But as you say, anecdotal. :)
>> PS. I've yet to find a consumer RAID controller which actually works
>> properly. They all seem to be hopelessly unreliable. And most of them
>> are software RAID anyway; the controller is a normal IDE or SATA
>> controller, and the Windows driver does all the actual RAID functions in
>> software. It seems that only the £££ server-grade controllers actually
>> do the job properly.
>
> Software raid exists for some platforms - and for mirroring for backup
> purposes, that's really all you need. Heck, you could do it over iSCSI
> with a fast enough connection (I've seen that done as well).
I've written a simple cronjob which uses bash scripting and some
command-line PHP to automatically tar/7zip our primary server's vital sites
and databases once every 24 hours, and then FTPs that over to our over
server in a different datacenter automatically. Works fine too. The data
centers are about 10km away from each other.
That way we can lose only one day's worth of changes, which (cause we're
small!) usually isn't much. But I can see the point of some kind of "live"
solution if you do a TB a day or whatever.
--
Stefan Viljoen
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:42:48 +0200, Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> I don't know, I've got a drive that I take to the office with me about
> every 2 weeks. It sits at home off usually (unless I need something off
> of it). It's actually 2 500 GB drives in an enclosure that Maxtor sold
> about 4 years ago now.
>
> I bought two of 'em.
>
> One stayed plugged in 24x7 for 3 years and then it croaked - most likely
> a head crash. The other has had periodic use for 5 years and shows no
> signs of slowing down.
>
> Of course the first showed no signs of slowing down either - right up to
> the minute that it croaked.
See my other reply too... granted, but you refer to an "enclosure" - is that
a mobile drive? E. g. one which you pull out of its enclosure at work, then
you put it in an enclosure at home if you need something off it?
*brrr* - I shiver at the thought of a mobile HDD as a backup device...
How do you feel about the statement that the fact that if a drive is mobile,
inherently it will never last as long as a "traditional" statically mounted
drive that just sites in a cradle internally in a climate controlled server
rack / box?
--
Stefan Viljoen
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Tim Cook wrote:
> As for myself, I've never had much luck with optical media. Trust them
> way less than hard drives. But I'm planning on getting a new desktop at
> the end of the month with 2x1 TB and was going to use this external
> drive as the backup for *that* (until I need a second one)...
Same here! I've had more than one DVD-R or RW go bad. If I archive important
stuff to a R or RW disc, I usually make another archive copy 6 months or so
down the line. A year later I rotate, throwing out the "tail end" disc and
writing a new one. More than once I had to "bring forward" the
backup-backup disc, 'cause the "real" archive copy had gone south.
In the olden days on the Apple ][ with CP/M I had three - the grandfather,
father and son (and holy ghost! :) - I still remember the stomach churning
dread of those horribly loud floppy drives grinding and grinding and
then "BDOS ERROR" on the monochrome green-screen... Those were the days!
> As I said, I *hope* it's just the enclosure that croaked, and the drive
> itself is just fine.
Isn't that hoping against hope? I mean, the most mechanically vulnerable
components are in the -drive-, no the enclosure? The enclosure is just a
port and physical container?
> If it's not...I dunno. Data recovery places are expensive, and I don't
> know if I can justify $1000+ even on the ~year's worth of data I had, at
> the moment. How time-critical are these kinds of things? Can I just
> keep it and when I have more money in a few months send it to a data
> recovery place, if I can't get it working myself?
Not sure, but I think the quicker you do it the better the results you might
get?
--
Stefan Viljoen
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>> As I said, I *hope* it's just the enclosure that croaked, and the drive
>> itself is just fine.
>
> Isn't that hoping against hope? I mean, the most mechanically vulnerable
> components are in the -drive-, no the enclosure? The enclosure is just a
> port and physical container?
Typically an external enclosure contains some kind of controller to
convert from IDE/SATA/whatever to USB. This is a non-trivial piece of
electronics, and it's not inconceivable that it could break.
Seems kinda unlikely though...
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Invisible wrote:
>>> As I said, I *hope* it's just the enclosure that croaked, and the drive
>>> itself is just fine.
>>
>> Isn't that hoping against hope? I mean, the most mechanically vulnerable
>> components are in the -drive-, no the enclosure? The enclosure is just a
>> port and physical container?
>
> Typically an external enclosure contains some kind of controller to
> convert from IDE/SATA/whatever to USB. This is a non-trivial piece of
> electronics, and it's not inconceivable that it could break.
>
> Seems kinda unlikely though...
That's what I was thinking of, yes. Mechanical components tend to fail much
more easily or regularly than a few tens of millions of transistors, not
true?
Ooo can't wait for solid-state drives to become common... and less
expensive...!
--
Stefan Viljoen
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Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> Ooo can't wait for solid-state drives to become common... and less
> expensive...!
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173953
http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpresentation/index.php?product_id=IPE64PSSD
...so that's 64GB for about £100. It wasn't so long ago that you had to
pay £400 for 4GB (which is almost useless).
It's happening. Slowly.
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> That's what I was thinking of, yes. Mechanical components tend to fail
> much
> more easily or regularly than a few tens of millions of transistors, not
> true?
Just depends on how it's been designed really, both electrical and
mechanical systems can be rubbish or really reliable. I suspect as a very
rough rule-of-thumb, the mechanical parts are more vulnerable to extreme
shocks and vibrations, whilst electrical systems would be more vulnerable to
static and extreme temperature/humidity.
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Invisible wrote:
> Stefan Viljoen wrote:
>
>> Ooo can't wait for solid-state drives to become common... and less
>> expensive...!
>
> http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173953
>
http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpresentation/index.php?product_id=IPE64PSSD
>
> ...so that's 64GB for about £100. It wasn't so long ago that you had to
> pay £400 for 4GB (which is almost useless).
Hey, that's not TOO bad. Still a hell of a lot more expensive
than "spinning" drives though, at least when converted to local currency in
the PC wholesalers here.
--
Stefan Viljoen
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scott wrote:
> Just depends on how it's been designed really, both electrical and
> mechanical systems can be rubbish or really reliable. I suspect as a very
> rough rule-of-thumb, the mechanical parts are more vulnerable to extreme
> shocks and vibrations, whilst electrical systems would be more vulnerable
> to static and extreme temperature/humidity.
That's what I was thinking of.
Read a while ago that the RAF had to pay compensation to almost a hundred
car owners - one of their air-defense "steerable-array" radars went haywire
and scanned over a road - they burned out almost every vehicle's ignition
and fuel injection microprocessors with the radar beam!
The point being an old, mechanical vehicle ignition system (carburettors, a
rotor and points) would have just driven on with no problems.
Viz a viz mechanical against electrical failures...
--
Stefan Viljoen
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>>> Ooo can't wait for solid-state drives to become common... and less
>>> expensive...!
>> ...so that's 64GB for about £100. It wasn't so long ago that you had to
>> pay £400 for 4GB (which is almost useless).
>
> Hey, that's not TOO bad. Still a hell of a lot more expensive
> than "spinning" drives though, at least when converted to local currency in
> the PC wholesalers here.
It *is* still far more expensive, but SSD drives are now appearing in
sizes that might actually be useful for something, and prices that
normal human beings can actually afford. I'm sure it'll take time, but
hardware prices only ever seem to go down.
I haven't seen any data about the reliability of SSD vs HD. Bare in mind
that flash RAM has a theoretically limited number of write cycles.
Personally, I'd probably use SSD for my system partition (for the faster
booting) and use cheap spinning disk for my POV-Ray renders. ;-)
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:02:15 +0100, scott <sco### [at] scott com> wrote:
>
> Just depends on how it's been designed really, both electrical and
> mechanical systems can be rubbish or really reliable. I suspect as a
> very rough rule-of-thumb, the mechanical parts are more vulnerable to
> extreme shocks and vibrations, whilst electrical systems would be more
> vulnerable to static and extreme temperature/humidity.
In my experience, failure causes of cheap USB hard drives are almost
evenly split between the drive itself having mechanical damage and the USB
interface circuitry dying. Some enclosures are also vulnerable to
mechanical failure in the external connectors, typically the power
connector.
--
FE
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Jim Henderson schrieb:
> Mirroring (or duplexing) provides a pretty good degree of data protection
> because the odds of both drives dying at the same time are pretty small.
Yes. About the odds of your computer dying from a nearby lightning
strike, drowning in water, or being consumed in a fire.
Which /may/ be exactly one of the types of incidents one may want to
protect against...
> But I also back up directories from several systems to other systems
> using rsync.
Sounds more like it.
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Stefan Viljoen schrieb:
> I've seen this phenomenon on older drives. Had a HDD in a system here that
> was left on for years, probably been turned off 20 or 30 times in its
> useful life. The fortieth or forty-fifth time the server was turned off,
> the HDD died - after running reliably (while not being turned off, ever)
> for 5 or 6 years. Ok, old hardware and an old drive, but just goes to show.
> Keep 'em spinning is better than spin-up / spin-down on a daily basis.
To me that rather makes a case that running a HDD 24-7 nonstop (probably
at high workload) may instead just increase the risk of
death-by-power-cycle.
Otherwise you'd wonder how office computers, being powered on and off 5
or 6 days per week, could possibly last even two months. Yet they're
usually good for about 5 to 10 years (though they'll be long outdated by
then).
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Stefan Viljoen schrieb:
> *brrr* - I shiver at the thought of a mobile HDD as a backup device...
>
> How do you feel about the statement that the fact that if a drive is mobile,
> inherently it will never last as long as a "traditional" statically mounted
> drive that just sites in a cradle internally in a climate controlled server
> rack / box?
Sure, a server rack in a proper server room is probably the safest place
for a HDD to live in.
But I don't think a good external case is any more dangerous to HDD
health than your average office ATX tower, that gets its thermal shocks
day by day when switched on, and some accidental (or sometimes
deliberate) kicks by its user now and then.
Yes, backing up to a server farm is probably the safest way to go
(especially since server farms usually have their own backup schemes
:-P), but it is not always an option.
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> Read a while ago that the RAF had to pay compensation to almost a hundred
> car owners - one of their air-defense "steerable-array" radars went
> haywire
> and scanned over a road - they burned out almost every vehicle's ignition
> and fuel injection microprocessors with the radar beam!
Haha LOL, although not so LOL if it was your car.
> The point being an old, mechanical vehicle ignition system (carburettors,
> a
> rotor and points) would have just driven on with no problems.
I think that's quite a specialised failure mechanism :-) I suspect the
point with the ignition system is that for the same amount of money you can
make a much more reliable electrical one than purely mechanical, given how a
car will typically be used (ie not driving in front of an uber powerful
radar).
BTW, I wonder if the police could have a portable version of such a radar,
which they could use to stop cars...
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Jim Henderson schrieb:
> See my anecdotal evidence in reply to Stefan. Two identical units, one
> powered on and off regularly, one that was left on 24x7. Guess which one
> failed? Not the one that has been turned on and off regularly for 5
> years now. The one that was plugged in and running for 3 years solid.
I wouldn't be too much surprised if HDD manufacturers would know ways
how to optimize drives for one usage pattern or the other, so that maybe
indeed powering up and down might kill a server HDD quickly, while 24x7
usage might shorten the life of an office computer / consumer HDD.
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Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> Read a while ago that the RAF had to pay compensation to almost a hundred
> car owners - one of their air-defense "steerable-array" radars went haywire
> and scanned over a road - they burned out almost every vehicle's ignition
> and fuel injection microprocessors with the radar beam!
>
> The point being an old, mechanical vehicle ignition system (carburettors, a
> rotor and points) would have just driven on with no problems.
>
> Viz a viz mechanical against electrical failures...
It always amuses me how film writers seem to think that turning an
electronic device off makes it immune to an EMP... I thought the idea
was that an EMP will physically fry the thing like a microwave oven
fries CDs. :-P
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Invisible schrieb:
>> As for myself, I've never had much luck with optical media. Trust
>> them way less than hard drives.
>
> Depends. We have a batch of archive CDs which have all gone unreadable.
> We have other, much older CDs (like ten years older) which are still
> readable to this day. Seems to depend on how cheap the disks are.
I must say that I wouldn't trust optical media any further than I can
throw them (which, of course, /can/ be quite far, but only in
non-turbulent air and if you know how... and if you're not out with a
dog who likes to play fetch...)
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Stefan Viljoen schrieb:
>
> In the olden days on the Apple ][ with CP/M I had three - the grandfather,
> father and son (and holy ghost! :) - I still remember the stomach churning
> dread of those horribly loud floppy drives grinding and grinding and
> then "BDOS ERROR" on the monochrome green-screen... Those were the days!
That reminds me of those Iomega "jaz" drives that were all the rage 10
years ago. We had two or three "pools" (12 computers each) equipped with
those where I was studying back then, which were intended for the
Multimedia students to store their many hundreds of Megs on.
They seemed pretty fancy stuff - until it turned out that they could
contract a contagious disease, some hardware defect that would cause
them to screw up the storage media in just the right way to ruin the
next drive they'd be put into in just the same way...
Praise be to the inventor of the floppy disc that we didn't see /that/
in the days of the 3.5"-HD FDD!
>> If it's not...I dunno. Data recovery places are expensive, and I don't
>> know if I can justify $1000+ even on the ~year's worth of data I had, at
>> the moment. How time-critical are these kinds of things? Can I just
>> keep it and when I have more money in a few months send it to a data
>> recovery place, if I can't get it working myself?
>
> Not sure, but I think the quicker you do it the better the results you might
> get?
I guess it depends. If the original fault would be a broken airseal,
you'd probably want to get the data out ASAP, before dirt can accumulate.
If the thing is still airtight, I don't think it makes any difference
whatsoever. In their all-metal casings, HDDs can keep their data for
quite a long time, and their only worthy adversary is particulate matter
of any size.
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Invisible schrieb:
> Typically an external enclosure contains some kind of controller to
> convert from IDE/SATA/whatever to USB. This is a non-trivial piece of
> electronics, and it's not inconceivable that it could break.
>
> Seems kinda unlikely though...
Heh - believe it or not, but somme colleague of mine actually managed to
screw up a USB /stick/ just by accidently dropping it.
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clipka wrote:
> Heh - believe it or not, but somme colleague of mine actually managed to
> screw up a USB /stick/ just by accidently dropping it.
You may recall that one of our BD people managed to damage a USB stick
somehow. When I did a block-level copy, I found that the first several
dozen blocks contained only zeros. I have *no idea* what the hell she
did to that thing... She's pretty ditzy though.
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Invisible schrieb:
> I haven't seen any data about the reliability of SSD vs HD. Bare in mind
> that flash RAM has a theoretically limited number of write cycles.
I once read an article about that. Quintessence was that with a properly
designed SSD, that does sophisticated "load balancing" of write cycles
across its memory blocks, it would take several /years/ of writing at
the maximum transfer rate to come anywhere close to the current limits...
And as storage capacity increases, so does the time it takes to screw up
any one block of a write-cycle-balancing SSD.
One caveat though, at least theoretically, is that the lifetime will
probably depend on how much data you store on the SSD. For instance, a
maxed-out drive doesn't have many spare blocks to balance write loads
on, so it might become technically possible to screw up a block by
repeatedly overwriting the same portion of a single file while leaving
all the other files unchanged.
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:52:54 -0500, Tim Cook wrote:
> You mean TB, mayhaps?
Yeah, that's what I meant. Hey, it was 2:24 AM here when I posted
that. ;-)
Jim
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Invisible schrieb:
> Personally, I'd probably use SSD for my system partition (for the faster
> booting) and use cheap spinning disk for my POV-Ray renders. ;-)
How much storage capacity do you need for a Linux system partition?
They fit /entire/ Linux installations on a single CD, so...
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:32:33 +0100, clipka wrote:
> Jim Henderson schrieb:
>
>> Mirroring (or duplexing) provides a pretty good degree of data
>> protection because the odds of both drives dying at the same time are
>> pretty small.
>
> Yes. About the odds of your computer dying from a nearby lightning
> strike, drowning in water, or being consumed in a fire.
I've had a computer struck by lightning. Thing is, anything plugged in
is likely to be affected by a lightning strike.
> Which /may/ be exactly one of the types of incidents one may want to
> protect against...
In which case you do the backup, break the mirror, and shut down the
extra drive, disconnecting it from the power and the system.
>> But I also back up directories from several systems to other systems
>> using rsync.
>
> Sounds more like it.
It's another option.
Jim
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:11:32 +0200, Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:42:27 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>
>> See my anecdotal evidence in reply to Stefan. Two identical units, one
>> powered on and off regularly, one that was left on 24x7. Guess which
>> one failed? Not the one that has been turned on and off regularly for
>> 5 years now. The one that was plugged in and running for 3 years
>> solid.
>
> Hmm... well, no contest there. I guess there can be other factors
> involved besides on / off frequency then? My personal experience with
> server-grade hardware I've worked with differs though. It does seem (at
> least in my personal experience) that turning HDD's on and off less
> makes them last longer. But as you say, anecdotal. :)
Yeah, that's the problem with anecdotal evidence, of course. Server
grade hardware that I've worked with has varied - I had a Compaq
Prosignia 4/66 with a RAID controller in it, and it had heat problems - I
occasionally would lose two drives in the array. The system was used in
my home, so I didn't have the kind of cooling you'd have in a computer
room.
>>> PS. I've yet to find a consumer RAID controller which actually works
>>> properly. They all seem to be hopelessly unreliable. And most of them
>>> are software RAID anyway; the controller is a normal IDE or SATA
>>> controller, and the Windows driver does all the actual RAID functions
>>> in software. It seems that only the £££ server-grade controllers
>>> actually do the job properly.
>>
>> Software raid exists for some platforms - and for mirroring for backup
>> purposes, that's really all you need. Heck, you could do it over iSCSI
>> with a fast enough connection (I've seen that done as well).
>
> I've written a simple cronjob which uses bash scripting and some
> command-line PHP to automatically tar/7zip our primary server's vital
> sites and databases once every 24 hours, and then FTPs that over to our
> over server in a different datacenter automatically. Works fine too. The
> data centers are about 10km away from each other.
I operate a website for our local community council, and while the system
is hosted by a local ISP, I take a nightly backup as well - using sshfs
for the files and a cron job to dump the database.
> That way we can lose only one day's worth of changes, which (cause we're
> small!) usually isn't much. But I can see the point of some kind of
> "live" solution if you do a TB a day or whatever.
Yep.
Jim
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:53:14 +0100, clipka wrote:
> Jim Henderson schrieb:
>
>> See my anecdotal evidence in reply to Stefan. Two identical units, one
>> powered on and off regularly, one that was left on 24x7. Guess which
>> one failed? Not the one that has been turned on and off regularly for
>> 5 years now. The one that was plugged in and running for 3 years
>> solid.
>
> I wouldn't be too much surprised if HDD manufacturers would know ways
> how to optimize drives for one usage pattern or the other, so that maybe
> indeed powering up and down might kill a server HDD quickly, while 24x7
> usage might shorten the life of an office computer / consumer HDD.
That seems to be reaching to me.
Jim
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:42:03 +0000, Stephen wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:42:48 +0200, Stefan Viljoen wrote:
>>
>>
>> Of course the first showed no signs of slowing down either - right up
>> to the minute that it croaked.
>>
>> Jim
>
> The way of the world*
>
>
> * By William Congreve - premiered 1700
:-)
Jim
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Stefan Viljoen schrieb:
> Read a while ago that the RAF had to pay compensation to almost a hundred
> car owners - one of their air-defense "steerable-array" radars went haywire
> and scanned over a road - they burned out almost every vehicle's ignition
> and fuel injection microprocessors with the radar beam!
Ouch!
That reminds me of the tale told by an old acquaintance of mine, who had
served on some air-defense radar installation, of how they'd keep an
older fellow soldier at bay when he got all enraged and charging for the
hilltop bunker they were sitting in.
You know, the old guy had a pacemaker... so pace he did make when he saw
those radar antennae slowly closing in on his direction...
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:14:40 +0200, Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> See my other reply too... granted, but you refer to an "enclosure" - is
> that a mobile drive? E. g. one which you pull out of its enclosure at
> work, then you put it in an enclosure at home if you need something off
> it?
No, it's an external USB storage device with 2 (I presume) IDE hard
drives in it.
> *brrr* - I shiver at the thought of a mobile HDD as a backup device...
>
> How do you feel about the statement that the fact that if a drive is
> mobile, inherently it will never last as long as a "traditional"
> statically mounted drive that just sites in a cradle internally in a
> climate controlled server rack / box?
Given that this mobile drive lasted longer than a stationary drive that
was the same make/model, my anecdotal evidence wouldn't support that
assertion.
That said, I do not abuse the drive that I move from one place to another
- and the drive isn't intended as a "backup" per se - it's intended more
to be a local copy of data I may need when working from home (which is
90% of the time). The data itself is backed up by our IT staff.
Jim
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>> Personally, I'd probably use SSD for my system partition (for the
>> faster booting) and use cheap spinning disk for my POV-Ray renders. ;-)
>
> How much storage capacity do you need for a Linux system partition?
>
> They fit /entire/ Linux installations on a single CD, so...
Ah yes, but under Windoze all programs insist on being installed on C: ;-)
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On 11/08/09 20:09, Tim Cook wrote:
> My half-full terabyte external hard drive seems to have died. I opened
> the case and there doesn't seem to be anything visibly wrong with the
> drive, and it was working just fine earlier today (even ran a checkdisk
> to be sure)...it just doesn't spin up when powered on. Hopefully it's
> just the enclosure. Have ordered a new one, which will arrive in two or
> so days.
I had an enclosure die on me. As have many of my friends.** No more
enclosures for me.
** Lose enclosures. My friends didn't die...
--
Engineers: often wrong, seldom in doubt.
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On 11/09/09 03:24, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:16:44 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>
>> Stefan Viljoen wrote:
>>
>>> guess there isn't a convenient modality for backing up 500GB of data?
>> There is - but not for sane prices, no.
>
> A 1.5 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive costs a mere $95 from newegg.
>
> I guess that arguably is an insane price - insanely cheap.
Sounds insanely expensive to me. Even for a USB flash drive...
--
Engineers: often wrong, seldom in doubt.
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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:49:57 -0600, Neeum Zawan wrote:
> On 11/09/09 03:24, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:16:44 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>>
>>> Stefan Viljoen wrote:
>>>
>>>> guess there isn't a convenient modality for backing up 500GB of data?
>>> There is - but not for sane prices, no.
>>
>> A 1.5 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive costs a mere $95 from newegg.
>>
>> I guess that arguably is an insane price - insanely cheap.
>
> Sounds insanely expensive to me. Even for a USB flash drive...
Yeah, now if I had written TB instead of GB (which is what I meant to
write), that changes the dynamic a little bit. ;-)
Jim
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