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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.
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/
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
Sounds about right. I've had two crashes, one was back in 2006 and it was a raid night in WoW, the drive head of my main drive crashed. The other was a SSD failure, when I was writing a term paper. Luckily in both cases I used a triple redundancy solution for my backups and was up and running again in a few hours. I learned way, way back in '91 that if you don't have a backup you're up shits creek.
Om, nomnomnom...
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 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.
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.
I have to disagree - Yes, I personally go for a waaay more paranoid backup approach, but just backing up to an external USB HDD (though with a "real" backup, not his manual drag-and-drop BS) puts someone a whole world of hurt better off than 99% of computer users.
If Grandma calls and says her HDD died and she hasn't "run that DVD backup thing" in a few months, well gee, sucks for you, granny! If, however, she calls and asks for help getting her nightly USB drive backup reinstalled to a new computer, hey, cool, she's lost almost nothing.
Now, sure, perhaps her computer got hit by lightning and toasted both. Perhaps her house got flooded and nothing electronic in it still works. Perhaps her PSU went bad and toasted every component in the machine (although even then, USB devices will often survive that). Perhaps she caught a cryptolocker-type virus that ate the backups as well. Sure, a single connected backup device has a lot of points of failure in common with the system drive itself. But in practice, it drops that "lose everything once every few years" down to "lose everything once in a lifetime".
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.
Dropbox lets you retrieve previous versions for up to 30 days.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
When I reads these comments, I can't help but feel sad that I have very little data valuable enough to go through this trouble.
I have my family photos and docs backed up. That's about it.
No theres three
WD/HGST
Samsung/Seagate
Toshiba
When WD bought out hitatchi's HDD buisness (which got renamed to HGST in the process) the regulators wouldn't allow them to keep the 3.5 inch drive part of the buisness as that would reduce the number of players to two. So that part of the buisness was sold to Toshiba (who already made 2.5 inch drives). http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
I would also note that having the same corporate overlord does not nessacerally imply having the same quality or lack thereof.
Samsung owns Seagate.
You got that backwards, Seagate bought samsung's HDD buisness.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Or as you are making a backup. A friend of mine thought it would be a good idea to backup their entire laptop drive, reinstall the OS, and then restore their data from the backup. They bought a new external drive to carry out the plan. They backed up the data, and re-installed the OS. The backup data was only going to be the sole copy for a short while, so one drive with the backup aught to be enough for the couple of hours it would take before restoring it, right? No, the brand-new backup drive failed mid-way through the process. It took weeks to recover maybe 3/4 of the files using testdisk.
I think most experienced users know that if a drive is going to fail it will probably do so very early after purchase or years later, but I'd never seen such a horrible demonstration of that expectation for myself. It failed mere hours after putting it to use. Needless to say, they now make sure there are always 2 backup copies during a wipe-and-restore procedure, and I follow that practice too. I would have thought it was paranoid, but it's not.
Two Is One, And One Is None