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Message # 65062.1.2.1.1.1 Subject: Re:OT techhie question Date: Mon 24/08/15 04:14:16 GMT Name: A Nonny Mouse |
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There are only two types of computer users: (1) Those who have experienced a hard-drive failure, and (2) those who are going to experience a hard-drive failure. Back up anything you care about.
BTW, do you know why services like Google and Amazon are so reliable? Their drives fail all the time, but they have a gazillion of them and keep multiple copies so that you don't notice all the failures. Those of us with more modest available cash have to remember to make backups. |
In reply to Message (65062.1.2.1.1) Re:OT techhie question
By Prian - Wed 19/08/15 05:20:58 GMT Hi,
buying more than one hard drive will be a good idea. It's better to have always a backup of the data that is important for you. I'm using a NAS drive to make a backup of all of my pc's and server's (including a 2nd NAS), now about 14 TB. That is not the cheapest way, but I want a backup of ALL of my data.
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In reply to Message (65062.1.2.1) Re:OT techhie question
By Ngawa - Wed 19/08/15 00:12:10 GMT Thanks for all the replies folks - I hadn't actually thought of a 64mb sd card - I feel that would be far more reliable in the long term than an actual drive with moving parts and so on. I'll definitely get some kind of storage medium - I might even buy two and duplicate the data just to be on the safe side. |
In reply to Message (65062.1.2) Re:OT techhie question
By Malvineous - mrnemesis@ntlworld.com Tue 18/08/15 21:17:46 GMT Honestly, it's pure luck. Most of them seem to last forever, but they can also die shortly after being bought. In business use, I tend to see failures occur around the 2-4 year mark. The drive in my previous PC started to play up after four years, though it does still seem to work -- it suffered a dropout (that corrupted the video driver, which is why I discovered the problem: really laggy display after rebooting for updates), and drives that have experienced that fault still seem to stay running.
Lifetime is a combination of luck, and how the drive has been used (operating temperature, number of stop/start cycles etc). RAID 5 in servers seems to work hard drives to the grave: the activity level in the RAID 5 algorithm stresses drives no end. I've only seen one or two drives die in RAID 1 configuration, but plenty die in RAID 5 configurations (both Dell and HP servers).
I thought I'd killed the drive in an old laptop by leaving it running for weeks on end with the lid closed. However, after letting the drive cool down--as it had got extremely hot--it started working again and has been fine since.
With external drives, the IDE-to-USB or SATA-to-USB adapter is far more likely to fail than the drive itself; those circuit boards are awful. However, I've seen the actual drives fail, too (pulled them out and put them into a drive dock to test them). Even the power supply failure rate is several times the drive failure rate when it comes to mid-2000s Freecom drives.
I would personally be extremely concerned about data on a hard drive that's 10-12 years old. |
In reply to Message (65062.1) Re:OT techhie question
By soggybottom - Tue 18/08/15 16:35:20 GMT Buy the new damn drive. They make external drives in teribites now and they don't cost that much. If you value the content, spend the little money that one costs and store all your material on it. I do photography and have three separate external drives for redundancy. |
In reply to Message (65062) OT techhie question
By Ngawa - Tue 18/08/15 16:13:11 GMT Can anybody tell me how long a hard drive can last? I have a load of stuff stored on an old drive that I pulled out of a laptop when the motherboard died about 10 or 12 years ago. It's quite full now (it's only 50Gig) but there's stuff on it going back to 1997 when I first got onto wet look sites. I put it in a special casing that I got quite cheaply and I can plug it into any pc as an external drive but I dread the day that I plug it in and it doesn't work. I suppose I could buy a purpose made one with lots of space but I'm a cheapskate and anyway this drive has been such a good old friend... |
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