Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Him having a backup on the same machine is almost as bad as not having one at all, IMO.
That was bad, but holy fuck, his backup "strategy" was manual drag-copy!!! It sounds like the "backup" drive was fine, but just didn't have all the data he needed to recover, because it was never copied there.
Why is this guy writing about computers???
Probably because computers don't bite you in the ass merely because you write about them without knowing about them; while most other computer-related jobs have built-in punishments, exacted somewhat more capriciously but almost as inevitably as a hot surface burning your hand when you touch it, for not knowing what you are doing.
Puking up column-inches to wrap around the ads is pretty safe by comparison.
Stop reading! Back that drive up!