Hard Drives/ External Hard Drives/ & BACK UPS

[davetranter]

Western Digital

I have a Western Digital WD6400 (6.4Gb) drive, which I bought (pre-used) around 2001. it has been powered up/down and written/read almost daily since. No problems. I have only ever (IIRC) seen two 'dead' Western Digital drives from that era. No idea of the build quality nowadays, but they were built like tanks back then.

All best

Dave T

 

[davetranter]

Back-ups

Such a shame I can't edit my posts!!!

I meant to include that I keep three copies of my most important data, two copies on large (1Tb) external drives, with the third copy 'spanned' across several lower capacity drives. I am a big believer in 'belt and braces' (would that be 'belt and suspenders' stateside?????)

All best (again!!)

Dave T

 

[mark_wpduet]

Western Digital did not

tell me I had to send the drive back. When I was on the phone I asked the CSR and she said either I had to send it back or just simply go their site and fill out a sensitive data form which I did......I didn't have any sensitive data but I just didn't want to go to the trouble of sending it back....But I would have if they required it.

I opened it today to see what it looked like and I don't see how dust could possibly harm the drive because it looks completely sealed....Yea, dust can get in the case through the vents but not in the drive itself......I bought an enclosure and I'm going to try to see if it's the drive itself that's bad or just some other issue with the components perhaps

But that makes me wonder.............How can they ask for something back which could have private or valuable information on it........Records, phone numbers, acct numbers, etc....What if in transit it got lost in the mail...?

 

[kb0nes]

"But that makes me wonder.............How can they ask for something back which could have private or valuable information on it"

If this is indeed a requirement, remember that they (WD) set the terms for the warranty. You either meet them or they don't have to fulfill it. The risk is yours, you don't have to take it.

Of course if the drive is bad, its HIGHLY unlikely any information would ever be pulled from it. Not many people would go through the work not knowing what they may get for the effort.

For what it is worth, out of the drives I have seen fail WD is the majority. I also remember a Maxtor and a Seagate. I had one Hitachi GST fail but that was due to an over voltage from the power supply.

I have got lucky salvaging data with two drives by swapping out the controller board to extract most everything from the disc. Be sure you have an identical drive so the electronics are the same. I had one not work when I tried this too so there are no guarantees.

You can always send the drive to Ontrack and for $1000 to $3000 they will get something off of it. Talk about having someone over a barrel...

 

[mark_wpduet]

kb0nes

Good point.....Sometimes some of us don't think about the fact that we buy and use something enters us into their contract...

At any rate - I wanted to share this........Guess what - the enclosure arrived today and I stuck the drive in and it spun up and worked perfectly...I'm shocked....So it's the electronics in the case I suppose that had an issue and not the drive.

 

[ovrphil]

Mark wpduet - I bought a Seagate Backup Plus 2.5" 1Tb. drive last year - less than six months of use, and it started with the flickering light - unable to read the disk. I might try swapping out the drive and putting it in the external 2.5" drive case...and see if that brings it back to life, but one question - what was happening to yours after you "cleaned" it with a vacuum source? Was it trying to read the disk or just dead? Thank you.

 

[mark_wpduet]

The light on the front just blinked consistently ........No noise, no humming of a drive spinning, no nothing, just a blinking light.....

 

[ovrphil]

Thanks Mark - hmm, now the big decision...this is definitely a good reason for me to try what you did.

As they say, "but do you have the meatballs to go with it?".

 

[mark_wpduet]

You should try one of these

This is the coolest thing.........The drive fits right into it (both 2.5 and 3.5 inch) and it connects to usb.

http://www.amazon.com/Plugable-Lay-Flat-Docking-Station-ASM1053E/dp/B00APP6694/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1376748896&sr=8-6&keywords=hard+drive+dock

 

[ovrphil]

That's a good solution and may use it..though I currently just bought a few months ago, this SIIG:

http://www.amazon.com/SIIG-SuperSpe...388&sr=8-5&keywords=siig+hard+drive+enclosure

I like that you can use two sizes of drives in your enclosure. Nice!

SSD's are still expensive, but I would like to move on to those, like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momentus-7200RPM-Hybrid-ST750LX003/dp/B00691WMJG/ref=pd_bxgy_pc_img_y

Thanks for your idea!

 

[nurdlinger]

I have two of these

One for work and one at home. They work *great*. As shown, it will mount either a 3.5" or a 2.5" drive in either slot. Interface is via USB-2 or eSATA. (eSATA is an extension of the real SATA interface, there is no speed penalty as with USB) The only drawback is that the drives don't cool very well. I keep a small tabletop fan blowing across it when doing any disk-intensive work. (like system backup). In case you cannot read the name, it's a "Blac X Duet" from Thermaltake. Mine are a few years old, I think now they also have a model which uses USB-3.

*EDIT* The picture is of the model with USB-3. The units I have do not say "Superspeed" on them.

 

[mark_wpduet]

I know what u mean

by cooling.......

But it would seem logical that since these are out in the open they would cool better than in a case.....The Western Digital My book's hard drive is inside a case with no fan at all.......Just vents on the outside. Since these are out, I would think they would cool better....they still get hot.

Question:

Is it HARDER on a hard drive to transfer data than to just access the date? Say, if you have a movie on a hard drive - Is just playing the movie on the drive LESS work for the drive than actually transferring it from one drive to another?

 

[washer111]

Playback versus Transfer

I'm not entirely sure if playback is "live streaming" off the drive, or if the drive uses cache to achieve that, or if Windows itself drags the entire file off the drive (as quickly as it can) and puts it into RAM... 

 

But transfer is asking the disk to get the whatever it is off there as quick as possible, so data is read, put into cache if Windows cannot read it off and shift the data elsewhere quickly enough. 

 

To be honest, I don't think it would make all that much difference - the drive still spins at 5400, 7200 or 10,000rpm (or anywhere inbetween or lower), it is just how quickly Windows (or your preferred OS) is pulling data out of the cache on the drive and how quickly the drive is refilling that as it reads data off the drive!

 

So really, the drive still has to move the heads around to read the data, however depending on the transfer it may only do that in parts. It still reads the same file, so it still wears the same. Heck, the heads may even park on occasion whilst watching a movie, leading to annoying stutters and jerks. If you ask whether it puts more wear on a drive to defragment or "just leave it," I would say the former, as the data has to be moved to the end of the drive and built into one "lump" then other data shifted to make way for this contiguous file "lump." Finally, that data must be shifted back. On most storage/system drives, there are thousands upon thousands of files to plunder through.

"Just Leaving" the fragmentation doesn't work wonders for speed, but it certainly reduces wear (at least in the long run) - shifting data back/forth to defragment just wears things out. 

 

Just my two-cents, but I do hope it is "helpful."

 

[mark_wpduet]

No

I'm actually talking about taking the drive to your TV and playing the files via a media player connected to hdmi.

I notice that the drive seems to get much WARMER if I'm transferring date TO or FROM the drive than actually playing what's already on the drive (this way), so I wasn't sure if it was equally as hard on a drive just merely playing files that are already on there vs transferring.

 

[washer111]

I suppose then that the drive isn't being "exercised" as hard if you are streaming straight off, rather than bumping data elsewhere - as it is just a slower movement of data. 

 

The increased heat from Heavy Read/Write I/O is probably just some strain being placed on the drive's electronics if it has to shift the heads a lot because of fragmentation, and there is lots of data being pushed through the drive, but I wouldn't consider it to be an issue so long as things don't started getting too much above 104ºF-113ºF. Then maybe you have a drive that is working the Power Connections (eSata, USB3 or whatever) too hard.

Google's own studies have found drives that stay too hot consistently or too cool consistently (Below around 90ºF) or are cycled heavily between these ranges can have trouble, but I think the connections on the external enclosure itself would break long before anything bad were to happen to the drive itself (Whether or not it is the infamous Western Digital "Green" series...). 

 

Wear on hard-drives is more about Load Cycles (Number of Head Parks) and the Number of Power Up/Down cycles. This puts the most strain on the mechanism. Leaving the drive on whenever practicable stops that temperature cycling as well as stress on the drive's electronics and reduces the chance of cycling wear on the drive. Sure, plenty of drives from the 90's are still around and kicking healthily, despite being cycled plenty. But take care of your drives, and they will take care of you! I've heard of server disk-arrays which went years without powering down. Then, they decide to pull the entire system to re-organize and restructure. Most of the drives from that server actually died as a result of that shutdown. Don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger ;-)

So really a little bit of I/O is nothing for the drive to worry about. Just plain 'ol usage. 

 

[mark_wpduet]

Gotcha

My main thing is getting the data on the drive, and leaving in there until the drive fails. Not always adding or deleting data......but transferring 1.2 terabytes of data onto a clean hard drive took 14 hours!!!!!! Of course it's usb 3.0, but my usb ports are 2.0, and the xfer rate was about 18 to 22 mpbs.

I have 2 green drives......what do you mean "infamous" green drives? Don't tell me they are the worst.......I also have a Verbatim that has a Samsung drive inside I believe. It's around 2 years old I think.......

 

[washer111]

Western Digital Green Drive

Western Digital made the fatal mistake on these drives to save power by setting the drive's firmware to park the heads (move them off the platter) after 5 - 8 seconds of inactivity. 

 

This means, if you use the drives in a RAID Array, on a Linux Operating System (which caches small write jobs and then writes them every 15-30secs or so) or are justing using the drive in a situation where it will experience short periods of inactivity, the heads are going to be parking/unparking constantly to keep up with demand, sending the LCC (Load Cycle Count) through the roof. Thankfully, I believe the Green drives they used for they external storage had this issue fixed, though for (unfortunate) people like me who wanted cheap network storage, we have to download a utility from WD, make a bootable DOS Floppy/CD/Flash-drive and flash the drive's firmware to either disable or increase the time between activity stopping and the heads parking. 

 

Apparently, this is no issue if the drive is used as secondary storage in a regular user's PC, but WD has said the drives were suitable for RAID 0 or 1 applications (Not so much Raid 0, as they are missing crucial error recovery parameters) - but the Head-Parking issue can manifest. I'll be eager to see just how bad mine is after 1.5 months of 24/7 usage on my Active-Directory server (with it containing all the logs + User Profiles and User Files)

 

[mark_wpduet]

That's way over my head

I have no clue what RAID is.(LOL)

Regarding the heads parking/unparking.......You had mentioned that if that's the case sometimes playback could cause skips or freezes ,etc. I haven't noticed this at all using the Micca Speck media player (which is AWESOME by the way)

No experience with Linux or Mac, just PC Windows since using the net starting in 1995.

 

[sudsmaster]

I used to do this stuff for a living (file servers and such).

RAID stands for, take your pick, "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives", or "Random Array of Inexpensive Drives".

It's a bit misleading, since the discs were not exactly inexpensive, since RAID arrays place special demands on the disc drives.

There are various flavors of RAID, most of which I've thankfully forgotten, but they range from just mirroring two drives (like you have done) to having, say, a volume spanning three drives, with a fourth drive acting as a redundant drive that can step in and take over for any of the other three drives that might fail. It's cheaper than mirroring drives but it does require special software and controllers. And all the drives - at least when I worked in the industry - have to be pretty much identical hardware.

Howver for businesses RAID, while adding fault tolerance, isn't enough to staisfy business requirements for disaster prevention and recovery. For that, regular scheduled backups are required. Back in the day these were mostly tape, and probably still are for many companies. The advantage of tape is that you can take the tapes off site for secure storage, so if a tidal wave hits the main site the business data can still be retrieved from off-site storage. Tape tends to travel well, unlike disc drives which may be more sensitive to shocks and such. It also can store a lot of data. The drawback of tape is that it's a linear format and ill suited for random retrieval of data. It also tends to be slower in playback than disc drives. I imagine optical discs (DVD and Blu-Ray have stepped in and can perform limited backup functions for smaller amounts of data. In some cases backup drive arrays are located off site and then data is backed up across a secure link. Lots of options there.

Back when I worked in the IT field, it was often a difficult task to convince a small business or department of the need to back up their disk drives to tape. But after one loss of vital business data to a disc drive crash, they suddenly became converts and all ears for any sort of disaster prevention recovery recommendations. Funny how it works that way. Probably still does.

Me? I back up my book keeping software data files at home regularly. The rest? Don't ask ... But then I'm not running a business here.

 

[volsboy1]

Just keep your ears open to the click of death.It is a a click like a clock if you hear that that means the drive is about to go anytime

It won't do it all the time if your lucky but it sounds just like a loud clock tick tick tick tick that pattern not the normal Hardrive

noise you always hear.With my Tower I always leave open because I am always doing something with it..I have ran across that

about 4 times and manage to save my data before I started to using raid arrays,I am sure the seizures I was having and pulling my P.c. in the floor while gaming   don't help hard drives that much either.

I want to open up that Seasonic power supply and find out what failed in it that would cause it to torch everything.I could do that

but if I touch it I will flush another 300 bucks down the drain with that damn void sticker.