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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.
Is millions of external HDs being hastily plugged in and spinning up.
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/
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
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???
I've had my drive up and running for over five years! This hard drive failure FUD is way overbl
Yeah, the whole article came off as "Look how stupid I am even though I am supposed be writing about IT."
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.
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.
Stop reading! Back that drive up!
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".
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.
TIL is a fairly common, in recent years, initialism for "today I learned." The very first result I got for a Google search for "til" is the TIL Reddit. The very second result was an urban dictionary entry. I don't know why I bothered to do the work for you; I suppose I felt generous being your Google-bot.
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).
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
The billionaires don't pay estate taxes. For one, it's not a tax on death, or the person who made the money being taxed twice. It's an income tax on the person receiving income (from an inheritance). And you tax based on the income value. You can gift someone about $15k per year without triggering income or estate tax thresholds. So you gift your little Paris $15k in hotel stock every year forever, and you'll pay out $1M tax-free. Also, when you die, you put it all in a trust structured to shield them from tax liability. The standard plot device of "rich, but not" where you have controlling interest in Stark or Wayne Enterprise or whatever, but no spending money. Like in the comics, this wealthy but poor only lasts a month, before they are back to normal. But those tricks are used in real life to avoid income taxes, especially for inheritance, and business holdings.
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