Replace Hard Drive After 3.5 Years?

Probably the best idea, and keep transferring the dat to new drives as you go.

For the original poster:

Don't make the mistake of thinking that archiving to CD's is any kind of archiving! If a person does a lot of research (to be sure to buy the correct ones and to learn the proper handling), never marks on the CD's ever,(store them in a jewel case and mark on that - go figure on what to do if they get mixed up) stores them under ideal conditions, handles them only with gloves, and prays daily to the CD gods, they just *might* last 10 years.

I've had a number of Archive CD's fail after a year. I now to backups to two separate Hard drives. One on the computer, and the other to a firewire drive.

- Mike -

>

Creating an image (ghost) of your system drive is the way I have resigned to do and as an external drive it can be used to back up several computers. Vlad

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Until recently, I've gotten away with using a Conner Peripherals hard drive of ~820 MB and even a 127MB drive from a PC/AT and the current stable is 2/3

1998 and before and includes ISA cards in some cases. I believe the high RPMs and increased stress brought along by improved storage technologies bring on an earlier demise. Few of my devices or cards are newer than 1999 or 2000. I've never had a CD data backup fail. and I believe such problems are analogous to the CD rot troubles of the commercial audio industry. I am certainly not so cavalier as to leave them out and about like some audio CD consumers. I HAVE had CD failure and haven't gotten around to investigating it with the mfg. That disc took about 8 years to fail also. Proper maintenance is always a good thing but proper selection of suitable equipment seems more so.

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1999

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industry. I am

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CD-R quality really does matter. I haven't had any problems with the gold discs I bought for a dollar a piece 8 years ago, but a few of the silver uncoated ones that friends have given me have become completely blank. Also, had my first DVD-R fail the other day, a cheap unbranded one that someone sent me. Those are supposed to be more durable because they're enclosed entirely in acrylic.

However, as to hard disks, I'll take the faster, fails more often drives any day. For one, I've got 400 gigs of data online (entire CD collection ripped losslessly, digital photos), and that's just not possible with the smaller drives. But for two, the new drives are so fast and so cheap - most of the new motherboards will do hardware mirroring, so for around $100 you can have 40 gigs of totally redundant, very fast storage (2x40g 7200rpm drives). They don't even use a proprietary format, so if the motherboard dies, you can retrieve the data with any machine, since each hard disk is just a duplicate of the other. And by fast, I mean transfer rates 10x faster or more than those old drives, and seek times almost twice as fast. But they do fail more often. Still, using RAID and decent backup strategies, I haven't lost a significant amount of data since I was using a 2gig HP SCSI hard disk.

-Keith

The weight of the platters does have some effect, more weight means higher load and more friction in the bearings. I don't know how much real world effect there is from this though.

It doesn't have much at all to do with the operating system itself, my drives (as with most users I would say in the current era of 120+ GB drives being the norm) are mostly filled with digital media files, a combination of audio, video and images as well as a few large games. The operating system I run makes no appreciable difference, without the media files I could run any OS I want with all the applications I have on a 20GB or so drive. Of course if I ran something on which very few of the games and applications I run are supported, naturally the size of the drive I need would be less.

IBM was testing platters made of glass. Light and little change with temperature variations.

To accelerate a heavy truck to a certain speed takes much longer then a lighter vehicle, provided the power is the same. Most of the current required to run a group of hard drives is at the starting point

Vlad

higher

world

I've always been a fan of buying two-platter drives. Seems like the best comprimise between heat and overall size. Of course, that said, the server has all Western Digital 250 gig drives in it, four in total. So far none of them has even registered a single SMART error, but they've only been in service around nine months.

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Same here. I used to run Windows on half of a 40 gig drive (the other half had the swapfile on it) until it failed, and it was never more than about half full. Now it's on a 120 gig drive, which last I checked had 108 gigs free. Bought that drive for the speed (areal density, 7200 rpm) rather than the side.

However, the other two media drives are full to the brim. Whole CD collection on one, digital photos and other data files on the other. Of course the important stuff is backed up to DVD also, but I really like to have it online. The server is half-full with the DVD collection.

Anyway, the in-service failures I've had are as follows:

80 meg Maxtor, started getting more bad sectors a few months before I stopped using it. 2 gig HP. Stopped spinning up. Got it to spin up once, got most of the data off of it. Forgot a few critical files, but them's the breaks. Didn't do backup at the time. Every one of these that the computer store I worked for sold failed in exactly the same way. 4.6 gig Fujitsu. Stopped spinning up. Switched out the controller board for another, copied the data off. 1 gig Microdrive. Bad sectors like mad. Got all the photos off of it fine, replaced under warranty. 40 gig Maxtor. Started obviously reallocating sectors. Bought a 120 gig Seagate as a replacement, pulled all the data off with only a handful of bad sectors. Of course, one of them happened to be in the Windows Registry, reinstalling hasn't fixed it, and I haven't had the time to install that machine from scratch since I use it every day.

I've had other out-of-service failures, ie pulled a machine off the shelf where it was sitting for a year and the drive wouldn't spin up any more. Since there was no data lost I don't really consider those. In case it seems like I've had a lot of drive failures, I've actually used around two dozen drives over the period of time that covers. Currently a Samsung has started kicking back occasional SMART errors at

20k power on hours, but since it's been doing those since around 17k I'm not so worried. Anyway, it's just an online backup, so if it dies I don't really lose anything except a layer of redundancy. For a little perspective, current in-service drives are: 10g IBM, 20g IBM, 40g Maxtor, 40g Samsung, 40g Western Digital, 2x120 gig Seagate, 1x160 gig Seagate, 4x250 gig WD.

I'd like to see better options for backup and data protection, now that computers are becoming appliances. What I'm looking for is a little seperation from the actual hardware. I would love it if you could just buy drives as modules, and there was a 'space->reliability' slider that you could just tweak one way or the other. Use some form of RAID, and hide the complexity from the end user. For someone like me who is happy to set up a RAID5 array, it wouldn't matter so much, but for the average user it could be a boon.

-Keith

I remember computers that didn't have Hard Drives.....10" flopys anyone. It has been my experience that all drives have the ability to fail at the most un apropriate time leaving behind a plethera of lost documents and data.... pick any drive, but don't rely on it ! Back up, back up, back up, on cd, dvd, floppy disk, or ram disk but if you don't want the crash beast to bite you in the ass BACK-UP cheers have a good one chuck

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10"? You're exagrating, they were 8".

--
Former professional electron wrangler. 

Michael A. Terrell 
Central Florida

anyone.

It's a guy thing.

--
N

Yes Keith you are right. heat is the principal enemy of electronics, I modify my case in order to accommodate a larger fan located in front of the 4 hard drives and they run just above the ambient temperature.

On the previous subject. I completed the installation of 3 switches that turn power OFF to the drives ( the C: doesn't have a switch) and I am about to go out and get one more switch to install on my second serial drive. So far everything works fine. I even, accidentally , switched power OFF on one of the drivers that was running and switched ON again with no problems.

Thanks to all of you that contribute to this small project.

Vlad

Heat is the principal enemy of electronics, I modify my case in order to accommodate a larger fan located in front of the 4 hard drives and they run just above the ambient temperature.

On the previous subject. I completed the installation of 3 switches that turn power OFF to the drives ( the C: doesn't have a switch) and I am about to go out and get one more switch to install on my second serial drive. So far everything works fine. I even, accidentally , switched power OFF on one of the drivers that was running and switched ON again with no problems.

Thanks to all of you that contribute to this small project.

Vlad

FYI check the web there were 10" floppys but 8" were far more common both the websites below refer to the original 10" floppys, I don't think the memory is failing that bad just yet....but whats a couple of inches like NSM said it's a guy thing......

or

here's a quote from one of the sites "A drive based on flexible media. The original floppy disks were 10 in. diameter. Later floppy drives were 5 1/4 in. in diameter. Both of these had flexible media and a flexible outer jacket. The current standard is a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk contained in a hard plastic case.Yet this not a hard drive. Its medium is still floppy. The current standard 3 1/2 floppy disk contains 1.44 MB of information. By default, the first floppy drive is designated A:"

they may come in all sizes but I still maintain if its important Do A Backup!!!!!!!!!!!!!! cheers chuck

I

can

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*might*

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2/3

am

CD

investigating