Known-good drive manufacturers, known-trusty PC review sources

is

tested

The reality is all there, you just don't want to hear it. If it won't restore to bare metal it's not a backup. Think hurricane Sandy.

?-)

Kewl. I knew you were smarter by being more experienced than Jason et al,.

?-))

Actually there is backup, and there is backup. If a SYSTEM backup won't install to bare metal, it is not a "system backup" - however a "data backup" assumes you will be starting from a new system and installing all programs - then importing or "restoring" the data.

It is no less a "backup" than a "system backup" is - just differnt horses for different courses, as the saying goes.

Only been doing it professionally for twenty some odd years.

Seagate Disk Wizard provides options to make a backup file that can be restored from a working system, or a bootable version written onto a DVD etc that will restore to a new wiped drive. You can boot the DVD and then select a stand-alone backup file on another drive. Western Digital provides their own version for their drives. jsw

HD Clone works good too. So does EASE-US disk backup and even their partition manager software. Image to an external HDD or even a USB MemStick.

you're coming though loud and clear like a bad joek once again zero content. it's clear you don't know what you're talking about,

That is quite true---occasional reinstall is a good thing because you pick up new ways of doing things instead of keeping your old config that may no longer be the best practice.

I don't think there's an infallible manufacturer. We have enterprise disk arrays at work and they work well because the disk failures are detected by the array and replacement disks are shipped by the manufacturer sometimes even before we read the notification emails.

The trick is to be failure-resistant. Disks are so cheap those days that I recommend just getting two and running them in RAID-1. I use software RAID on Linux because a) I still have individual access to the disks for SMART testing etc and b) software RAID is not dependent on hardware, so if my motherboard died I know for sure that I can just move the disks to another setup and they will work just fine, which is not guaranteed with hardware RAID which might use some proprietary setup.

For checking disk health I use smartd daemon and occasionally run SMART tests manually (smartctl -a to see the status, smartctl -t long to run the firmware test). There's a Google paper that claims that even single reallocated/pending sectors are a strong indicator of impending total disk failure. Fortunately, the manufacturers tend to honor their fairly long warranties (3 years is quite common), so I have replaced quite a number of disks

I don't trust the reviews--I just don't think the commercial publishers have the depth and interest in getting to the bottom of things. Seriously, Googling 'WD sucks' seems to consistently result in better information.

Almost all divers that failed for me started showing realloc sectors, so I ran 'badblocks -w' before sending them in. A paranoid person would get worried that the reallocated sectors might contain actual readable data, but I just don't have this kind of security needs.

Re. trusting the repaired disks, I just decided to trust the manufacturers' internal process. I do run extended firmware tests on the new drives. I haven't seen unreasonable failures yet.

Przemek Klosowski wrote in news:kdm5bq$kik$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

I usually go to NewEgg, and look at the reviews. Until very recently, nobody made a 1TB drive that didn't generate 15% to 20% one star reviews, which is usually the result of a premature failure. WD now has a 1TB drive that was running less than 10% one star reviews, so that's what I just put in a new NAS box for my wife's business. So far, so good.

Doug White