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When Will Your Hard Drive Fail?
jfruh writes: Tech writer Andy Patrizio suffered his most catastrophic hard drive failure in 25 years of computing recently, which prompted him to delve into the questions of which hard drives fail and when. One intriguing theory behind some failure rates involve a crisis in the industry that arose from the massive 2011 floods in Thailand, home to the global hard drive industry.
...would be my guess.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
When you least expect it, except if you expect it to happen just before taking a backup. Then it'll happen just when you expect it to.
Death, taxes, hard-drive failure.
Then it won't matter if when your drive/PC fails. Him having a backup on the same machine is almost as bad as not having one at all, IMO.
Is millions of external HDs being hastily plugged in and spinning up.
The 2005 tsunami also had a huge effect of lowering the quality before the 2011 flooding. Its been a constant and is probably also responsible for the rise in the SSD
Short answer: If you actually care, you need better backups.
:)
If the HDD in one of my PCs dies, I don't care in the least. Restore it from last night's backup to the NAS, and call it good.
If up to two of the HDDs in my NAS die, I buy new ones, swap them in, resilver them, and call it good.
If my entire NAS dies, I would start to get worried, but at that point I can still fully recover (at least to where I left everything last night) from my partially offsite backup, an exact snapshot of my NAS that lives in my detached garage.
If my house and garage somehow both get destroyed at the same time, I would lose a lot, but do still have my most important data mirrored offsite... Though at that point, I probably have more important things to worry about than re-ripping my music library.
But if you care about when any one particular drive will fail on you, you've already accepted the eventual catastrophic failure and loss of your life's work as entirely acceptable.
This is months old and probably one of the first things to come up when you do a google search on hard drive failure statistics. Also the blog linked to is not the original story.
This is where the actual data comes from... https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
TIL to never buy a seagate barracuda 3tb.
If you trust a single drive, or even a simple "dumb" raid array (no scheduled integrity checking) to maintain your data, you have no one to blame but your own ignorance. Now that you know how bad they are, do something about it.
that writes these "I lost everything hard drive failures"? You would think people who have been in the computer industry for a decade or longer would understand the importance of backups.
Simple rules
1) Automatic. Because if it is a manual backup, it won't happen.
2) At least 2 backups
3) One copy offsite
This is why I use RAID-1 on all my machines (except laptops which unfortunately don't usually have space for two drives) and why I use automated backups to both on-site and off-site targets so I don't need to remember to do anything.
I know RAID won't protect you from user errors, software bugs or maliciousness, but the number of times I've had a disk fail and not had to worry about lost data is worth the price of admission.
I've had my drive up and running for over five years! This hard drive failure FUD is way overbl
If you need to ask yourself WHEN it will fail, that is the wrong question. The right question is "are you ready for imminent hard drive failure?"
If you are not running under the assumption that your hard drives will randomly fail, you have already lost. I have 20 year old drives still spinning, and 2 month old drives turned paper-weights.
I stopped buying Seagate a long time ago. They just don't last (weeks to months before failure, often). I occasionally buy WD, but I usually stick to Samsung (for desktop spinning platters and for solid state) and Hitachi Travelstar for laptops.
Stop reading! Back that drive up!
I think any storage problems are based on many things. Heat, up time, design flaws, quality control etc. Apple just recalled some 3 TB drives in iMac's. I think this is a nice gesture but how many owners were actually affected? To offer such a recall I would guess Apple or its supplier determined that a flaw existed and that more of them would fail. I have seen hard drives do very well over 5 years or more without even losing data sectors to any significant degree. Funny how it seems the more capacity the more failures seem to occur? Not sure if anyone has done any conclusive figures on this. But I have generally only bought what I needed in storage. If I ever needed more I tend to add external storage or I add another drive internally. In the dozen or so laptops and desktops I have owned. I have had one drive failure in that time. That occurred shortly after purchase within a few months. I concluded that was certainly a defect. In general, I have always used power savers, sleep modes rather then powering down. I tend to believe cold power ups tend to shock a drive more then sleep modes and power saver modes. Could be just me, but others in the drive industry appear to recommend that same position. Cold startups kill drives a bit faster.
I have 12 seagate drives in a raid array. I finally had one fail, but it was after 8 years or operation, but I think that was my fault because I moved the server to a new rack and it was offline for about 30 minutes and it failed about 30 days later. Data loss? Zero. Personally I think backblaze is the cause of the seagate drive failures.
Check how long your warranty is good for. It'll fail about a week after that.
When Will Your Hard Drive Fail?
The exact time of the next hard drive failure is about as easy to predict as an earthquake. However, there is a well know law of physics which states that the more time that passes from your last backup the more likely your hard disk is to fail more or less regardless of the dis's age and the odds of the damn thing failing increase exponentially if you have been doing something really important and/or time consuming in the interval.
A "tech writer" that does not have an automated backup policy and does not care for his most valuable data is not worth reading.
How hard is it to setup a task in task manager for a robocopy batch file? 5 minutes?
Batch file with:
robocopy c:\ z:\ *.* /R:0 /S /R:0 /S ...
robocopy d:\ z:\ *.*
Robocopy:
http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html
Make a BAT file:
http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Batch-File
Task:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/schedule-task#1TC=windows-7
Typical stupid fucking "IT Guy".
2.5" Hitachi and Toshiba drives are extremely good.
It mentions on the horrendous failure rates of Seagate 3TB drives. I can personally confirm such thing, as my Seagate 3TB drive choked and started to die out on me. The drive technically still works... but it's having major issues trying to read random spots on the drive. It's not even half filled and yet the drive is running like a half-dead entity. After looking through Backblaze's articles, I noticed that the same model was used there and it had a horrible failure rate too.
What baffles me is how two big hard drive companies, Seagate and Western Digital, could produce terrible or mediocre drives after they've gobbled up Samsung's HD division and Hitachi's GST division. I hastily rushed out to buy a HGST 4TB drive (too big since I could personally live with 2TB) after seeing that I could buy one locally. So far, so good. But only time will tell if I end up on the short end of the stick again. (My fingers are crossed)
Often times, a 'dead' drive simply needs a replacement drive board (the silicon attached to one side of the drive. There are components that can go bad on the board, and someones all you need to do is find a board from another HD of the same make and model and the drive will come back to life.
A nice demantling of Back Blaze's reliability finding:
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/dispelling-backblaze-s-hdd-reliability-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html
Writing about hard drives and not making periodic drive images onto a portable hard drive (removed when the image is done to avoid power surges killing it) is simply inexcusable. Andy Patrizio doesn't seem to be a tech writer that understands the tech he's writing about. Otherwise, he wouldn't put out the embarrassing news that he's too stupid to make a full image backup of his hard drive, Sad. I'll make sure I avoid what he writes in the future as I can't trust that he understands what he's writing about.
As long as my laptop and my desktop don't go pfft at the same time as Dropbox, Onecloud, and Google Drive, I'm fine.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Friends, I am hear to bear witness! Once I lived in darkness and sin, and I have suffered the pain of my transgressions.
I kept one copy--yes friends--one copy only-- of data I believed was important.
One fateful day Providence saw fit to show me the error of my ways. The foundation of rust on which my data was build collapsed into the sea of oblivion and the data thereon was lost forever to the void. Yes, Lost! Lost and without hope of salvation!
But this was a blessing, Friends, a blessing and a revelation for it was at that moment of humiliation and regret that the truth was shown to this poor sinner!
(cue rising electric organ chord)
That data is gone and despite our mournful remembrance of our departed files, they can never be brought back from their eternal sleep.
But, friends, that data was not important. For verily it is written that none may know the hour that the data will be lost, only that the data will be lost. And it is also written that data of which there is only one copy is not important data.
Brethren (and Sistren...) do not repeat my error and sin! Learn from my sin and my shame and join me in salvation!
Use ye a robust and mature filesystem with many protective features as self-checking, and multiple parity.
Yea, I say unto you multiple parity. Spend ye a small sum today for truly I say to ye that if ye are afraid to purchase an additional drive, then surely professional data recovery is beyond your means! Trust not in single parity for it is written that filesystems have grow huge in our greed for virtual machines, high resolution, and hoarding. Yea, though RAID5 was once a stalwart guardian against the failure of a single drive, RAID5 is dead and its promises are vanity for surely on the day the first drive fails thou shalt begin to rebuild thy array and before thou canst complete thy task the second drive shall fail and on that day there will be no salvation but only the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Scrub ye regularly thy filesystem and furthermore perform regular smart long tests, but never at the same time, for it is written that a scrub and a long test shall persist unto eternity and never complete.
Implement well thy automated email notices and read thoroughly thy notices every week. When thy status report does not arrive at the appointed hour and when thy daemon sends thee an unexpected email, remain not idle but take action to investigate and resolve thy anomalies.
When thee hast constructed and filled a robust and well-monitored filesystem name it thy primary file server and do not rest in false security, but instead do the same a second time call this thy secondary file server. Locate ye thy secondary server in a place separate and apart from thy primary server and schedule ye regular backups from the primary to the backup filesystem. Monitor ye well the status of the backups and should the report of successful replication fail to arrive at the appointed time, investigate thy primary and secondary servers and all the links between. For in truth it is written that RAID is not a backup.
Go forth in peace my brothers and sisters in the knowledge that while it is inevitable that thy data will still someday be lost, this day will come to pass after all else has been lost and on this day the data will truly not be important.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
For Mac users, time machine is a complete no-brainer. RAID won't protect you against data corruption...but time machine will. Stick it on a NAS and you'll be fine. Then use BackBlaze or CrashPlan to back that NAS up offsite. Heck, there are crashplan clients for synology systems, so there's no excuse. And it's cheap! Would you rather rebuild your whole music library from scratch, or pay $60/year for some insurance? Hello!
Note that you probably don't want to back up your TM folder.
...But I had to remember to make manual backups via drag and drop. ...
With a backup strategy like the one he describes in place, it is amazing his data have survived this long.
.
His backup strategy is worse than non-existent. It gave him a false comfort.
A second drive in the same computer? Wow, just fuckin' wow.
I just made a note to never, ever read anything else Andy Patrizio writes. It is writers such as he who give tech writers in industry magazines a bad name.
geesh.
I read TFA and he did not have a backup, because he had to do it manually. The solution to that is putting it in the cloud.
So I am not sure how much I trust him with anything if his solution of 'manual' is 'the cloud'.
I had a HD failure on my main drive of my NAS. I do have automated backup, so no worries. Bought a new drive, moved the data back, done.
With the prices of HDs I have all data double and I have incremential backups on two systems. No, not offline (except for
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A mechanical hard drive is, well, a mechanical device, which can fail at any time due to vibration, wear, weak parts, and lots of other reasons. They're ticking time bombs. That being said, as with other mechanical devices, like cars, they are appropriately over-designed with wide tolerances. With cars, you get several years of warranty to have the weak parts replaced so that by the end of that period, it ought to be in good shape. Testing a hard drive is a time-consuming and expensive procedure, which is why only the enterprise drives get any factory testing. The rest just ship. To keep down the failure rate, drives are built with all kinds of mechanisms to compensate for variation. For instance, there are vibration sensors, and the firmware will slow down the spindle and read/write arm movements to ensure that the drive works *correctly* even if some have degraded performance. It is this approach that keeps hard drive prices low. While the failures are unfortunate, an alternative would increase prices for everyone, and the smart ones among us put new drives through burn-in testing anyhow. When I buy a laptop, I cross my fingers that the drive has been through some OEM testing. When I build a server, I do burn-in and use RAID.
Enjoy
Right after my warranty expires.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
" I used local backup. It was a second drive that sat idle and powered down in my PC 99% of the time, which is where I recovered most of the files. But I had to remember to make manual backups via drag and drop."
LMAO. Why the hell do you think Apple invented Time Machine? Why do you think there are any number of Windows auto-backup solutions out available? Why do you think could backup exists? JFC dude, so much for being an "IT expert."
This article just refers back to the Backblaze report, done years ago. It must be nice to just pull up old info, and claim a new story.
Oh good, another pissed off writer talking out his ass and mixing up corporate drives with personal level drives. Anyone who puts HGST's garbage above Seagate clearly has their statistics messed up. We don't know the conditions the drives operated in. How old were the power supplies? Was there vibration in just one rack? Was the whole place operating at 90F?
I love how they say "BackBlaze’s experience with the 2TB Seagate drives was flawless." Really? Because over 1000 people on newegg say they're crap no matter who you get them from. Oh wait, that's the non-commercial drives that we all ACTUALLY USE in our desktops.
If you're interested, here's the truth:
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/dispelling-backblaze-s-hdd-reliability-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html
nuf said.
1) Cannot do automatic, corporate security has disabled all these features.
2) 2 backups? Never happens.
3) Ha ha ha! *wipes tear* Good one!
Tips:
At home with your own security, you can do automatic. Make peace that if your media drive fails it is gone (or pony up the $$$ for the duplicate backup storage if it is that important to you). Generally speaking backup your important stuff, personal pictures, files, taxes, etc... Once you take videos and the like out of the picture the amount of storage you really need for back up is very minimal. A 500 GB external for example.
At work where security monkeys may have disabled everything under the sun to "protect" your account and password, you can still run automatic backups under your accounts while you are logged in, which can be a PITA on resources while you try and work, however if you schedule it for over your lunch break, just lock your workstation and go to lunch.
Offsite is hard to do, unless you are OK with cloud storage and can pay for it. As a pretty low tech solution, get a safety deposit box at a bank, physically swap out an external HD as frequent as you care to do it. As someone else mentioned, should your house burn down, you likely have larger concerns anyway.
No wonder I have replaced most of my array. I don't see baracuda 2GB in there, but I imagine they probably rate like the others. I had a 2 TB array built from 750 GB drives, that I replaced with a 6 TB array from 2 TB drives, all seagate.
In the years I ran the old array, I replaced 1 drive. In a similar span of time with the second array, I have now replaced 3 drives in that array.
-
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
...another scare article to get people to repl - wait - where's that smoke coming fro
Wait, you seriously expect us to buy 3 drives for every drive's worth of data we have, and then leave the house? /s
(Please, don't start on backing up to "the cloud". For US residential broadband and an "offsite" site reachable by road, it's going to be faster to dump the data to a USB drive and then put that in a car.)
Many people still don't make backups. Even most of my friends don't, and most of them are quite tech-savvy or even hardened by experience. When one of my friend's hard drive crashes I always laugh at them and say: "Backups are for whimps, no?" That seems to be the only way to make them take backups seriously.
-- Cheers!
Dammit so much.
Any advice for bringing a SSD back from the grave long enough to get some e-mails off it?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I work for a small repair/IT firm and our experience largely matches backblazes when looking at brands. We rarely deal with NAS drives or larger capacities so I cannot speak to those. There is a 2007 study by google into predicting HDD failure. Per their data, about 50% of drives fail with a discernible warning in SMART. However, that warning requires manual watching as what they saw is that any type of pending or reallocated sector is indicative of failure. However, a few pending sectors may not be past the manufacturers threshold for failure. Therefore, 50% will fail with no warning, that is a given. The number probably approaches 95% or more if you are relying on tools that compare SMART stats with the manufacturer thresholds. You need tools that allow you to set your own thresholds or look at the numbers manually on a regular basis. My personal (and uneducated) assumption about this is that most of the pending/reallcoated sectors are caused by the magnetic domains on the surface of the platters weakening over time. Given the areal density of modern disks, slight defects in the coating or other chemical degradation could be to blame. Basically this would be a form of bit rot, and makes a sort of sense given the failure rate seems to spike for all manufactures at about the same time frame. Lastly, all drives will fail. Also other events happen, be it fire, theft, crypto viruses that encrypt your files and local backups, accidental or malicious deletion, etc. An on-site backup protects against none of those in any reliable way. Add in the fact that SSDs (which also will fail for other reasons), and are more difficult (expensive) to recover from are gaining traction, an off-site backup is the most logical solution, be it cloud, safe deposit box, etc. I am not here to advertise so I won't name names, but the solution my firm sells is cloud-based with both file and system image backups, including versioning and archiving. It also allows for a local copy of the backup set to be stored on a suitable drive. This allows for super fast recovery of large backup sets, with the online version as a backup. The backup set is fully encrypted with a choice of encryption standards and the ability to have only the customer have the encryption key (normally we keep the key as well, but we do not have to). If you are serious about your data, you should look into features like that for yourself. Relying on manual on-site backups can only be a recipe for eventual disaster.
Silence is a state of mime.
If you don't make an ass out of you and me (assume) that the hard drive / ssd WILL fail then you are just the ass.
Backup your systems. Backup the backup. It will fail too.
S.M.A.R.T. is useless today IMHO. Don't believe anything it says about your drive. I've had drives that I know are failing, clicking, unable to read blocks -- but the SMART status says all is A-OK.
I personally like to put RAID-1 in my end user systems. The data goes to a RAID-6 array. The array is duplicated to another live. Never lost any data yet...
If you can keep your HD temperatures down between 35 to 45 celcius your drive will last longer. I've had countless WD and Seagate drives fail on me within 6 month's to 1 year and that's because my 4 bay case was not keeping cool regardless of the amount of fans pushing the hot air out. But 5 years ago I bought a large 6 bay case and it just keeps cool inside and my hitachi has been running for the past 5 years with no issues.
While interesting, the devil is in the details, and these are more less all generalizations. So yeah, don't go out and buy a Seagate built with those specific specs. That said, usually you can't tell wtf you are buying until you have it at home, crack the box and look at the serial numbers and such, at which point you are probably SOL anyway as it is yours now.
The analysis looks at the Hitachi drives as the best, which were acquired by WD. However they were acquired by Hitachi from IBM before that. IBM had it's own scandal for anyone that cares to remember for 1) The "DeathStar" class of drives that had an industry worst failure rate once upon a time for whatever reason, and 2) leaked documents about warranties and planned obsolesce, in that an approximate 3 year failure rate was more less built into drives for commercial reasons (i.e. to sell more hard drives). They were designed for 3 year lifespans, though they didn't intentionally fail after that.
Anyway it all depends. Certain drives, made at certain times, made by certain manufactures, *may* have higher or lower failure rates... This is why this topic is so hard to pin down...
I liken it to back in the golden age of OC CPU, people would be very particular to get lots or batches of certain CPU that would perform much better than their counterparts. However it had the same issue. You buy it, usually without knowing that kind of detail, roll the dice, and hope when you open the box it is the right serial number, etc...
Though where the similarity is really close it is by regional manufacturing. I vaguely recall some Intel CPU being make in Thailand, and others being made in Malaysia, and one being better than the other back in the day for a certain spec... I doubt it is much of a causality leap to infer that the drives made in China may be of lesser quality than those made in Thailand during that period of time...
One other thing to remember with computer electronic is binning. Usually in *any* electronics manufacturing process there will be binning where after QA testing, a product could pass, it could fail, or it could marginally pass and be classified as another product. As you may recall, after the whole Thailand flood, either for real or imaginary (for profit), there was a shortage of drives, and the prices doubled, then tripled. It would be VERY hard for any company to not cheat a bit in the binning process when the profit is triple what they used to make. So perhaps usually drives that might otherwise be binned as marginal or failiure, were making it to market simply because the drive you used to pay 70$ for is now selling for 300$ and that is too good to pass up (particularly for short term CEO getting quarterly bonuses not overly concerned with long term implications of branding).
Having a quality backup solution isn't all that hard these days.
On-site file server with a ZFS RAID-Z (2/3) storage pool. Frequent snapshots of data (hourly?). Occasional ZFS Sends to offsite location over VPN (nightly?)
Occasional ZFS scrubbing, which validates block level data against hashes rather than just a basic checksum/parity bit/SMART check. (weekly/monthly?)
Single drive failure? Just replace it, nothing is down.
Multi-drive failure? Depends on your RAID-Z level, but possibly still nothing down, and just replace the failed drives.
Accidentally modify/delete something? Just mount a snapshot and recover.
Entire storage server goes offline? Set a new one up with fresh storage, and just ZFS Send to it from the off-site server.
All of this is possibly from something as simplified as FreeNAS, or can be baked into a more robust solution as well.
....it's always when.
I once tried to back up my windows 7 laptop to a external hard-drive. It continuously failed with no good explanation as to why. Turns out The external-drive which was 2 TB had a different sector size than the laptop’s 200 MB. WTF Microsoft?!? You can’t bother to be more explicit that you need to have the right sector size before a huge backup that several hours later fails??? And even then doesn’t tell you why it failed?
I lost several hours trying to find the cause of the problem, and never did do the backup because I lacked a small or properly formatted drive. Yes this could overcome I’m sure with some re-partitioning – but why should an operation that Microsoft so shrilly reminds you to do, be so hard to do?
Letter To Iran
...to Google. I am sure some Slashdotter will feel umbrage at this approach, but it has worked wonderfully for me. I now have my documents synced from all my computers in one place, and as I said, backing up is done by highly trained professionals, using storage devices and methodologies far above my means.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The real hassle is backing up your operating systems along with all the software installations and installs.
Sure, we all have the activation keys for every piece of software we installed in a safe place somewhere?
That is also the royal hassle that Microsoft created when they started "authenticating Windows" against hardware configurations. You used to be able to just clone hard disks and take them to another computer when one failed. I know there are people who also build computers from parts, but Microsoft going to that model made building a machine from parts more trouble than its worth. And having a hard disk fail is probably the software industry's model for getting people to buy all the software -- OS, office suite, everything -- from scratch.
The Tao of Backup:
http://www.taobackup.com/
A novice wanted to learn the Tao of Backup.
The master said: "To become enlightened, you
must master the seven heads of Backup. He who
knows the heads will keep all his data forever.
He who knows them will lose all his data",
and with that the lessons began...
I have in my possession a 1TB WD Blue which was built in 2011.
The controller board was assembled onto the drive improperly, with the board bent over an alignment post instead of the post going through a hole.
Eventually, this caused a power issue as some SMD or other's RoHS solder joint(s) turned intermittent through years of heat-cycling: It wasn't spinning up or being recognized in BIOS.
I took it apart, looked at it funny, put it back together as properly as possible, and applied a rubber band to put some tension on things.
It worked fine. Acronis moved the partitions over, and the customer was back in business with zero loss.
Of particular note: This customer also had backups of their data. On-site, online backups (using whatever software a WD MyBook USB external comes with these days), but well-versioned and complete and up-to-date. They were already well-protected from such a failure scenario (though not a natural disaster or particularly-nasty malware).
Kid-proof tablet..
If it's important, make a backup. I've probably deleted important stuff by accident or carelessness more than I've lost things to hard drive failure, and that's when I was glad I had a backup (or if I didn't, then it was a painful reminder not to be careless.)
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
"When it is finished!"
if you are rich enough to qualify for an estate tax, then you are rich enough to afford lawyers to tell you how to avoid estate taxes.....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I have two synology 211's I got off of Ebay for 100$ ea. I have 5x 3TB WD Red drives. There are two in each configured as Raid 1. One station has misc stuff on it, (classic public drive), the other had critical stuff on it. The fifth is the transit drive. when one fails, the fifth one replaces the failed one and failed one is in transit (as we speak) to be replaced under warranty. I've bought the drives new from Best Buy, on sale for 99-105$, with 3 yr warranty, The nice thing about synology is there are lights on the front that show disk status and it beeps when one fails so I immediately know. Also, I have quite a few old drives that I can put in Sata swap racks in one of my pc to make periodic backups. Some of those drive are off site. The past spring I put the system together, had 1 drive fail recently and had no loss of data, just a short period of downtime. Just saying what I finally did. Its a big relief knowing my precious data is safe from the most typical failures.
hard drives will fail whenever it will cause the largest disruption, be it money, time, career, or life safety. they got it from further development of the "critical detector" in all office copy machines, which invariably takes the machine down for days when you absolutely MUST make a squillion sets of a critical document.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Why is it always the "IT Computer Expert"...
that writes these "I lost everything hard drive failures"?
Same reason (relatively) low-uid slashdot users start their posts in the god-damn subject line instead of the body of the comment: They are too self-absorbed to consider anything beyond their immediate gratification.
"Yesterday"
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Then immediately.
Sifting through it . . . . looks like MAYBE 100 gig is actually important to me.
Wow, that is a LOT of porn.....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
...to quotes from movies that almost nobody on slashdot has seen?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
OK, the subject is a bit of a click-bait, but I started thinking about it after I had to fix no less than four different devices within three weeks apart. I strongly suspect that I'm just strongly biased by my "local" sampling. Nevertheless, the fact that the devices were rather unrelated (an almost new compact flash, an SSD, a spinning 3.5' and a spinning 2.5') made me wonder: did anybody noticed a similar pattern recently? Now, if you excuse me, I have to sign a petition for stopping pool drownings by preventing Nicholas Cage to appear in movies.
I had a second disk on my machine that was used for backups, and I was very good about taking backups. My fan on my computer died, and as a result the disk controller screwed up and the disk controller seem to write randomly over both disks, thus destroying my system and my backups at the same time. Now I make sure that my backups are not kept on the same computer.
One thing is for certain: Iâ(TM)m buying an HGST drive after this.
My guess... you won't have to buy any. You'll be getting a case of them overnighted to you this week.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
the hard drive crashes you!
... his backup "strategy" was manual drag-copy ...
Manual copies are not so bad. On work computers I have religiously kept everything in /src and /doc hierarchies. I can back these up to an encrypted sdcard when traveling and should my computer spontaneously combust I could buy a replacement and be up in hours depending on the internet connection, downloading any tools/apps I need to install.
/music and /photo hierarchies and such to the scheme.
/doc, etc) is all I really needed. Reinstalling operating systems, tools and apps not taking much more time than a complete restore. Admittedly I also manually backup downloaded images of tools and apps to an external, but these are one time events, so everything needed for reinstall is on hand.
For a home computer add
I also do full backups to externals just in case but for decades I've found that backing up just the key hierarchies (/src,
all of my backups were on Andy's drive!
but if those HDs fail I am toast. I've copied some of the files to other sources. They seem to be running pretty good after all these years in addition to a couple older laptops. It's just backing up is tedious (and yes I read the post about HD failure 5 minutes after, "I'll back up later, too busy right now."). I've tried to connect external drives but getting the PCs to recognize them is difficult. All these devices are not connected to internet (and have never crashed since I've left them offline). There is option of going to NSA as they "backup everything" but my legacy systems are not connected to internet and NSA systems are like cockroach traps (can go in, but never come out). Reminds me regarding backup systems, can you get your files from it? Many companies have routine backup networks but it's horribly bureaucratic trying to get information from the backup HDs.
mfwright@batnet.com
What happened, the hard drive caught on fire and burned down the house?
Seriously though there is nothing catastrophic about a hard drive failure, it is just an is.
The catastrophe was this guy's back up plan.
love is just extroverted narcissism
In the 1980's and 1990's hard drives failed pretty regularly. In the 2000's less so. I have not had a single hard drive fail in the 2010's.
I don't have a huge sample set, just a few hundred drives, but it's big enough that I can see improvement in reliability over the decades.
So when will they fail? Maybe someday, maybe never. More likely it will never matter. I keep backups. Lots of backups. Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly... Backing up is easy. Do it.
If an old backup drive fails then I trash it and replace it. If my main drive fails I restore from one of my backups.
I'm sick and tired of being told to have cloud backups. Insufficient upload bandwidth and small data caps result in a backup process that would take over a year to complete. Let's just hope that my data doesn't change, I don't have a drive failure, and that I don't need my internet connection for other uses during that time.
Am I the only one that installed RAID 1 and never looked back?
Yesterday, as it happens.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
My 3TB Seagate drive was spotty from the beginning, but where I live getting a warranty replacement might end up costing you more than just buying a new drive. The latter is certainly faster and more convenient. It kept going for two years and finally died last week. The fifteen year old drive in my G3 iMac, however, refuses to die.
Except when it fails miserably and tells your backup is too big and it has to start a new one - every 4-6 months
I've had 10/10 of the drives I bought new fail prematurely. All Seagate Barracuda's. The first 6 were 1.5TB drives and the last 4 were all 3TB drives. It appears I bought the most catastrophic setup twice in a row to store my backups. I have one 3TB left and it is failing smart right now and is my slave backup drive so it can't corrupt and wreck up my primary backup drive. Looks like WD is back in the mix for me. I keep my most important files [ebooks, code, personally created files, etc] mirrored on those two drives, a working copy on my system drive and backed up to my usb stick in case my house gets robbed. The rest can go down the toilet but I like my digital library.
The biggest problem I've had with Seagate drives (I use a number of the USB drives) has been the USB connector at the bottom. After removing the drive from the casing, connecting it like a standard drive, and reformatting it, they've run without problem. But there's always that nagging doubt...so I just make sure I keep a number of backups just in case. I always worry about drives for which the manufacturer can't provide a 5-year warranty. That tells me they really don't have much confidence in their products.
Strangely enough, I have never had a harddrive fail. And I have been using a lot of them for a long time.
Maybe it is because I never move the devices when they are running? ==
(But I still backup critical data every day (or more) and the whole thing when making significant changes.) 8-)
My hard drives have been very good at lasting forever. However I did lose a 1 terabyte master this year with everything backed up. I always have an off site back up. Looking forward to my smaller hard drives dying. I have 2 80's I barely need.
I don't think there is any question that the floods and subsequent destruction of the factories in Thailand were the real cause of the shittiness of the latest drives. Certainly Seagate has never recovered. Part of the problem was that the workers for some companies were kept on payroll (reduced) and others just let them go and assumed they would come back when the new facilities were completed. Didn't work, as didn't the new facilities at the beginning, naturally. It was as much the way that the company responded to the setbacks that occurred as the actual problems of course. WD was very thoughtful and future-focused while Seagate just want money poouring into the bank ASAP. The results are obvious.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.