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How To Store Internal Hard Drives?
mike writes "I have been ripping all my movies and TV shows for easy viewing through a media PC. Because I would rather not rip everything again I'm looking for a simple backup solution. I'm considering a hard drive dock and several internal hard drives to use as 'disks' to back things up every once in a while but I don't know what the best way to store internal drives would be in the meantime. Could they sit together in any empty box and be OK, or would a number of externals be worth the slightly higher cost with fewer worries about storing them in the meantime?"
Any clean, dry, vibration-free storage is good for removed internal drives.
Yeah, they come in a nice box with antistatic bag and desiccant... what's wrong with that? Certainly the manufacturer likes this setup.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You should store them in the plastic containers they came in: http://www.ixbt.com/storage/scsi2005/roundup/fujitsu-pack.jpg These plastic boxes are anti-static and the bumps provide a modicum of shock absorbance. You might also want to add a (fresh) silica pack to prevent moisture from building up.
Buy a cheap used box from a local shop.
You can get P4 class boxes for around $100.
Stuff it full of drives, set up software raid and keep everything there.
In addition to providing a nice place to store backups, you can also use it for primary storage. I assume since you're ripping video that this is an HT-PC.
I prefer not to have a bunch of loud HDD's in my HT-PC. Put that crap in a closet.
If so, it might be smart to install/store them in inexpensive, standard USB disk enclosure caddies. That way, when you do need to go back to your archive, you can pop 'em into your USB port and they're ready to go straight away! And if you go for one of those book-style enclosures, it makes for a neat way to store them too.
Why don't you try a box and use magnets as packing peanuts? Be sure to leave them in a hot, humid place, like a shower, and never every spin them up
Dry, cool, and individually placed in anti-static bags, just be sure to spin them up every so often.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
At work, we would routinely have to deal with 5-10 hard drives a day and probably would order 40-60 a month. We stored them in anti-static bags in a bankers box. While that's not the exact brand we used (we bought them in 100 packs), its similar. During the few years we used those bags, we did not lose a single drive to storage loss. There were drives that were DOA or died during processing, or were dropped, but we never pulled a drive that was working the previous time only to discover that it was dead when we pulled it.
As for hookup, you have a couple of options. If you are going to do casual use, you can get an esata dock. It doesn't have a fan, but for all but the most intense use, it should be sufficient for transfering files and weekly backups. If you're looking for more, go with sata sleds (again not the brand I used, but similar), you can screw your hard drives into those and if your sata controller supports it, hot swap the drives. You can also buy extra sleds so that you can swap out your drives without having to handle the internal drive.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Professionals keep (at least) one off-site backup. You could rent a private locker in a bank or some other organization or make an online backup deal. I do use (two) USB disks for backups. They are pretty portable, fairly robust, plug in nearly every computer, have decent speed and good capacity.
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And use one of these to plug them in when needed.
Any solution that has the drives unpowered is preferable - no point in spinning a drive 24/7 when it's used for backup 5 minutes a week.
Unless it's one known for its ability to work on various and sundry drives (as opposed to identical ones), and probably built into whatever OS OP is running...don't recommend softraid.
Controller card/motherboard goes, or enough drives go and all his data's gone.
Whatever route you choose, keep in mind that hard drives as a whole have terribly high failure rate (about 1 in 8 fail in my experience). Also, regardless of your chosen media, be sure to research the lifespan of your storage. If you are looking for long term (more than a couple years) and dependability you are going to be spending more than you would on a cheap raid box.
As much as I HATE to say it, magnetic tape is the ONLY storage media that has not failed me yet.
Newegg has Hard Drive Protectors http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817990010
I've just stored drives in anti-static bags for some of my test systems when I upgrade drives and want to keep the old drives for messing around with. Haven't run into any problems.
Dual Opteron < $600
I like these guys: http://www.wiebetech.com/products/cases.php It's an anti-static, somewhat shock-mounted plastic case for 3.5" drives. I've got about a dozen stacked in a rubbermaid box. It eliminates the stress of the drives banging into each other, even in anti-static bags. I've never dropped a drive inside one of these, but i'll bet it'd survive a modest height.
I actually had the same problem. I've got my entire 1,000+ Movie DVD and 400+ Television collection ripped to hard drive for use as streaming media to a media PC. I've been working on it for about 4 years now.
I ended up buying and setting up a bare-bones computers with RAID capabilities. Get a big tower with plenty of cooling. I originally used your same method. I purchased hard drives and external hard drive enclosures. This was cheaper than building pre-made drives. I especially like Vantec enclosures. However, I had a couple of drives go bad over the years. After some experimentation, I found that underpowered drives tend to loose data.
Now, I use the aforementioned RAID 1 solution. Originally I used 400gb drives but now I'm up to purchasing 1-TB drives. I've only had 1 drive go bad in the last 3 years and it was easily replaced with no loss of data. You could probably use Raid 5 just as easily, but my first setup didn't support it so I defaulted to Raid 1. The extra controller cars also used to be cheaper for RAID 1 but the costs have since equalized.
For the moment, I would advise against the 2TB drives. Many have serious slowdown problems and the cost/storage ratio is to high. 1.5tb drives are looking better and better.
Just remember good cooling! This may be the most important factor. Hot hard drives last a MUCH shorter time. I REALLY like Thermatake icage bays. They change 3-5.25" bays into 3-3.5" hard drive bays and have a really nice 120x120 fan on them to keep the drives cool.
If you buy a hard drive a month you can get some enormous storage capacity really quickly without breaking the bank. I'm up to 8TB right now. (16TB of drives).
I just recently addressed this problem myself. My solution, although a little pricey compared to just stuffing an old box with hard drives, was to get one of these guys and put 5 1 TB drives into it. I have it running in a software RAID5, backing up everything from my server (media, subversion repository, etc) via a nightly cron job rsyncing between the server disks and the enclosure. So far it's been working like a charm.
The OP already has the online storage covered. This is regarding using HDD's for offline (not spinning) storage. Even if they're not being accessed and are physically separate from the primary storage, you still are subject to wear (spinning platters) and things like power surges.
Putting the dries back into their orignal enclosures, or perhaps an "OEM Pack" piece of foam (with anti-static bags) may be the best option. Better, consider putting the whole mess into a media-rated fire-safe.
Do a backup, drop it in the safe deposit box at the bank, take the other one out. Next quarter, rotate them.
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1Tb external 'books' are enclosed, store and look like books, can be labeled like books, and can be unplugged and plugged in like they're removable media. And they're not that expensive.
Best regards.
The pirate bay backup(tm) offers a free and easy 4 step method to backup most movies/tv shows. .torrent of all your movies
1) create
2) upload to TPBB(tm) trackers
3) seed
4) In case of catastrophic harddrive failure/house being nuked from oribt, re-download all your movies
Advantages of TPBB over conventional backup methods
*Off-site - the backups are held of site in multiple unsecured locations
*Distributed - these locations are distributed across multiple contents
*Unlimited storage - You can even backup more content than your hard drive has space for
*Content Filtering - TPBB will filter out boring content, ensuring just worthwhile movies are kept
**Please consult your lawyer before using TPBB as we are not responsible for any legal disputes in your jurisdiction.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
They don't guarantee you don't lose your data, but it's probably more safe than what you can come up with yourself.
You could attach a metal handle and call them 'wedges' a la Dollhouse.
The scene where he 'saves' the wedge from calling, they show the back of the drive and they're SATA. Hehe.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The only big advantage of the externals is that the connectors are a bit more robust, so if you're going to plug/unplug them a LOT, you're a bit better off.
But for maximum longevity you should take 'vibration free' seriously. That is, you shouldn't lay a drive on a hard table, because when you set it there there's a surprisingly large impact. Set it on a layer of bubblewrap or foam, instead.
If you have humidity issues, I believe you can collect desiccant packets from other things and bake them on low heat to 'refresh' them (bake out the existing humidity) Ideally do this baking with good ventilation.
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When you need to back up, turn on the machine.
When you're done, shut it down.
Offline storage at it's finest.
Maybe not directly relevant to the OP's question but since I see a bunch of folks mentioning using RAID, i thought i'd chime in about RAID5 survivability.
RAID5 protects you against one failure in a stripe. if you lose a drive, that's a failure. If you have a read error on a particular sector, that is another failure, and your data is gone.
the probability of a read error *somewhere* on a 1TB drive is actually quite high.
So, you lose a drive, you go to rebuild, you find you have a read error and can't get your data.
This can mean a few things.
1) lose a particular bit of data. Maybe you don't care, if you're archiving DVDs you'll probably cope just fine. If it's important data you'll be sad.
2) can't rebuild your RAID. Some RAID controllers will just give up if they get a read error during a rebuild, so then you have to back up the recoverable portion of your data (probably the vast majority), rebuild the RAID, etc.
I don't know how the various software RAIDs cope with this. I had this happen with a dell/lsilogic hardware raid card.
In my case, the read error was not something i noticed when i backed up and restored the data onto a new raid, but the parity didn't match so it wouldn't rebuild. It very well may have been on an unused portion of the filesystem.
solutions/mitigations:
1) scrub your RAID5's regularly. this process checks everything over and fixes any errors while you still have a full RAID5 set. This will reduce your chance of failure greatly.
2) use RAID6. it adds an extra drive's worth of redundancy.
3) use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive or some similar additional layer of redundancy.
You should also consider running an OS that supports ZFS (FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Nexenta). It has additional data checksumming that can help. ZFS has software raid built in.
Several good blog posts on this subject here:
http://blogs.sun.com/relling/tags/mttdl
He talks specifically about Solaris & ZFS, but the reliability stuff is generally applicable. RAID-Z is basically equivalent to RAID5; RAID-Z2 is basically RAID6.
I have contacts at the European Southern Observatory where the security copy of their archive is on disconnected hard-drives. Based on in-house tests, they reckon that the drives last very well provided that they are spun up at least once per year. If they are left unpowered for longer than that they tend to die.
A great way to get free anti-static bags is to order samples from semiconductor companies like TI and Analog Devices. They'll send you free stuff wrapped up in decently sized anti-static bags. Great for if you only have a couple drives to store, but if you need 10, for example, just go ahead and buy some.
I have two home-built servers: one is an always-on, live NAS; the other is a backup server that I power on only to do backups (or restores if it comes to that). First rule I go by: always use the slower 5400 RPM drives, such as the Western Digital "Green" or the Samsung EcoGreen. For both media streaming and backup purposes, these hard drives are still plenty fast. The biggest benefit, though, is that they use less energy (particularly important if your system is always on), and don't get as hot, making cooling much easier (which usually also translates to quieter).
My live server is currently 4 x 1TB drives in RAID-5, using Linux software RAID. (I know RAID is no substitute for backup, but I still consider it "quasi" backup. But I also have real backup.) This system is fairly un-interesting: it's your typical DIY NAS.
The backup server is housed in the Norco RPC-4020. For $300, you get 24 SATA hot-swap bays. That price is hard to beat. I haven't filled this case up with drives yet, and I have plenty of physical space going forward. The hardware is just some unused spare components I had lying around. Extra SATA ports are provided by the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 (which works fine in "regular" 32-bit PCI slots).
This, IMO, is a pretty simple set up. I just power up the backup server whenever I need it, and turn it off when I'm done. I don't care about performance, since backups are always run as a batch job (typically over night).
Before I bought that Norco case, I was just using individual drives with a Thermaltake BlacX SATA-to-USB hard drive docking station. This is cheaper, just slightly less convenient. I did order 50 "zip lock"-style anti-static bags for $13. I ordered them from staticbags.com ("GRC Enterprises" was listed on my invoice). After I copied data to the drive and put it in an anti-static bag, I just added it to the stack of drives I had on my bookshelf. The Norco case definitely looks better! :)
All in all, I consider my system fairly robust. It's only semi-secure against my stupidity, and since its all housed in the apartment, does not safeguard against fire. But since the media rips are just copies of DVDs I actually own, my insurance policy becomes the ultimate backup.
RAID is used as redundancy against hardware failure, not as a backup solution. If one of your drives fails in a RAID 1, sweet, you've not lost your data. However, overwriting all your data with crap will leave then you with two drives of crap. Where's your data now?
TFA isn't asking about hardware failure in a way that RAID would be the correct answer.
Don't forget to migrate to a new (set of) drives every 5 years or so. Drives get bigger and in my experience you can collapse 4-5 into 1 after that period. This assumes you end up with lots of drives. This also refreshes your copies of the data. Sidebar - watch out for your O/S silently converting long file names to 8.3 filenames if your filepathnames are too long (esp. if you lengthen the filepathname somehow).
Drobo.
Http://www.drobo.com.
I have 2 of them and one has saved my butt.
After losing 7 hard drives behind a cheap surge protector after a lightning strike, I now have serial APS surge protectors and a 4.5 TB Drobo.
Format it for 8 TB and you can swap drives in and out as you need to move up in storage capacity.
It's pretty brainless to use. You just plug it in and let it do its job. Get the fast SATA drives.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
My solution to this is to store my stuff on bare sata-2 drives (1 - 1.5TB @ $0.10USD / GB). I have a couple of eSata enclosures which offer tool-less installation - just a thumb-latch, and slide the drive in/out (about $50USD). So, I keep the bare drives organized on a shelf, and can plug one in as desired in about 30 seconds. Cheaper than tape, and just about as cheap as single-layer DVD-R discs, plus each 1TB drive will hold about 250 SL or 125 DL DVD's worth of data. Since the cost / GB is about the same for the newer 1.5TB discs as for 1TB discs of the same speed, I am getting the bigger drives these days. Each drive is about the size of a small paperback book.
If you want to back up one of these, with the eSata connection to the computer you can back up a TB from disc to disc in about 4 hours. That's a collection of a couple hundred feature-length movies.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Plug it in at your mom's house, rsync your local fileserver with that one every night at 4am.
But what happens if the fire spreads upstairs? With heat rising, that's likely to happen.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
If you'd just like to store your data off the PC, and you need "unlimited" storage, get a sata hot-swap mobile rack, a bunch of drives and presto!
Specifically, this is what I use.
Get one of these - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994057 and install it. Its' hot swap, and tray-less, so it treats the sata drives like cartridges. It's about $25.
Find out if your motherboard supports sata hot swap - if not, you'll need one of sate card that can do hotplug, try this - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132003. It works and it's about $25 as well.
Then determine your storage needs- 1TB drives can be had for as low as $75, but that's for relatively cheap drives. The better ones are about $100. 1.5TB drives are available for $130. The 2 TB still command a premium price at $280.
I'd recommend the 1.5's.
Buy a few of them, just like you would buy tape cartridges. Geek tip- if you buy several(4-5) drives at once from Newegg, they ship them in a styrofoam shipping thing, that has slots for 3.5" drives and works wonderfully as shelf container. You keep the anti-static bags the drives are shipped in, and put them on the drives before stowing them in the styrofoam form.
There, you now have the equivalent of a tape drive and cartridges, for all of $50 for the "drive" and cartridges at the price point you want. Unlike cheap tape, you get sata speeds, no vendor lock-in, and your data on a medium that is universal.
All that being said, you have do your backups as if the drives were tape cartridges- that implies a cartridge (drive) rotation system, data stored redundantly on multiple cartridges, regular backups and verification, etc. It won't do you much good if you don't follow the proper backup steps. Here's a guide to doing it properly- http://www.structuredsolutions.net/whitepapers/Tape%20Backup%20Procedure.htm
It is a nice piece of kit, however. It's up to you to use it properly.
The Internet has no garbage collection
I use internal drives like this as backups for my server at work. After I run the backup, I put the drives back into the antistatic bag and store them in a safe deposit box in the vault at my bank. I have a piece of foam in the box so the drives don't sit directly on the metal box. The box costs ~$100 a year, and is a dry, safe, secure, off-premise storage location.
Actually "wedges" was coined in the book Mother of Storms by John Barnes to refer to people's extracted memories.
Some people never learn...no matter how many times something happens to them.
For old drives that I pulled from servers, I just stuck them in a cardboard box on the floor of my office. When I needed an old small drive for something, I'd pull it from the box. :) I wasn't confident in wiping them to sell or dispose of, so staying in my control was safer. Hey, they were old, they weren't worth anything to sell anyways.
Except for the drives that already had stickers that said "bad sectors" or "clicks", they usually worked years later.
The static bag and desiccant isn't a bad idea, but it's not always necessary. Now, if they were in a very dry static or high humidity environment, I'd definitely want them stored that way.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Yes, because clearly, I'm the only person who points these things out. Hard drive or not, it's a little far-fetched that if you're a huge evil organization storing copies of people's brains, you're not keeping backups somewhere, or you're using small, easily damaged media where horrible things happen if it's destroyed. I can suspend disbelief for scifi, but not common sense.
And you know that there are no backups somewhere how?
They image someone's "mental state" onto a drive and obviously there's no backup at that moment, but then he files it into the library or whatever and then backups are made.
I know this is what happens because I just made it up.
I think the "wedge" refers to the slice of the brain contained on it and not the hard drive itself.
As with other things, the nomenclature shifts such that the device is referred to by its content or function. For all intents and purposes, if the drive only contains the wedge, the drive becomes the wedge made manifest.
Compare how you tell someone to "put in the movie" without regard to the medium on which it is stored (VHS tape, DVD) or the player (VCR, PS3). The storage material is immaterial; only the material stored upon it matters in casual parlance.
There's also how we hold on to some obsolete terms such as "dialing a phone" even when it is done on a keypad instead of a spinning rotary dial (even in science fiction, you have the DHD (Dial Home Device) which only ever spun rotary style on the animated Stargate Infinity). And though "don't touch that remote" has largely supplanted "don't touch that dial" for TVs, we still talk about "rewinding" video even when there is no spool of tape to be rewound, and probably will for a very long time to come.
The terms were coined in reference to the mechanism, but they stick around because it was never about the mechanism, only the effect.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Any clean, dry, vibration-free storage is good for removed internal drives.
Yeah, they come in a nice box with antistatic bag and desiccant... what's wrong with that? Certainly the manufacturer likes this setup.
Yeah, that should be good enough. The three things that are going to kill a drive are:
1) Physical damage. Keep them in a box in a safe place where they won't be dropped or crushed.
2) Static electricity. Especially with exposed components, and the possibility of hundreds of volts of static between two points in a room, keep it in a anti-static bag.
3) Humidity. No brainer, just keep a dessicant in there for long periods of storage.
As others have stated, simply running the drives occasionally will prevent the internals from having issues. As far as environmental issues, though, these should be the only three things you need to watch for in storage.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Actually, if you're going to store them for a long time (years) without running them, you'll probably need to keep them cold.
I hear (from someone that kept HD's on a shelf for years) that the oil will run out of the bearings if the drives are left sitting for years, causing the platters to freeze up when they were turned on.
Admittedly, this is old information, and who knows what the new drives do (maybe they have better seals?) and I'm not even sure that keeping them cold will help, spinning up the platters for 15 minutes once a week might work too.
[citation needed]
Old System, 12 drives: http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d162/mondmustaphamond/Floyd/?action=view¤t=Floyd_noLight2.jpg Upgraded system, 7 drives: http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d162/mondmustaphamond/Floyd/?action=view¤t=Floyd_Reincarnated_w_description2_c.jpg
found some reclose-able anti-static bag http://www.uline.com/BL_57/No-Print-Static-Shielding-Bags-Reclosable
I have a CentOS 5 Server running Web, email, and video server for my house. For backups I bought a USB external enclose that holds 4 drives. It automatically spins them down after (IIRC) about 20 minutes of non-use. Backups run on cron, I check it once every six months.
I've been dealing with this for clients for several years now - most of whom deal with AV and photography. Stuff that absolutely must remain intact at any cost.
For a while we used RAID - and RAID 1 and similar redundant options do work well enough. And we debated Blu-Ray. But the final solution seems to be solid state drives. They look to be stable enough once written to actually qualify as suitable for archival purposes. This comes as all hard drives seem to be suffering from poor quality lately. I just know that some of the companies are flat out lying to us in their white sheets based upon how many data failures I have witnessed in the last couple of years.
They aren't exactly inexpensive, but they do work better for this than a hard drive.
The ultra paranoids should watch the mythbusters episode where the water pressure prevented the manual windows from rolling down.
Curiously enough, they submerged a battery and a door and the power windows still worked underwater.
http://mythbustersresults.com/episode72