Looks like another HD disaster..

[camsr]

GetDataBack

nuff said

[Sickle]

(when was the last time you saw an external drive made of metal and connected to a heatsink?)

That would be my external that failed last month; all metal inside and out. That one seems to be having a mechanical error that I'm hoping I can get around. Not sure what happened, but the internal secondary came back online this morning on its own. I'm copying off the important shit, but there's a ton of it. At some point, its just not practical to burn of DVD's as a back-up solution. I've wanted to go with a RAID array for some time now, but funds this year just went to other shit.

[stowaway]

I would never personally advise anyone to use anything to store important data on but a Glyph or LaCie drive. That's it. No western digital, no raptor, no maxtor, no seagate, just no.

We have half a cupboard full of dead Lacie external drives at the moment. All of them power supply failures. Funnily enough the WD/Maxtor/Seagate drives inside them all worked fine. Lacie and Glyph make enclosures, not drives.

Yes. The sad truth. I made the same experience. I would never again waste a dollar on a Lacie. I wouldn't mind the occasional power supply failure. What I mind is that it was impossible to have them replaced. No luck at all. And that sucks big time.

[druid]

I'm a bit scared at people's reluctance to use external drives for more than even temp storage, or backup. I actually keep all my personal data on a USB drive (actually two, I recently switched to an enclosure that can power from USB but the data is sent over ESATA). I back it up regularly to an external RAID device. This gives me, essentially, three copies of it.

The only issue I've had with my external drives is inability to power up from USB, and that's because I had too many USB devices plugged into it. Since I managed it better, I've had no issue; and this has been my set up for a year so far. I admit, that's only a year, but I mirror my external use drive and my RAID drive; same partitions, and I just use Microsoft's free SyncToy to just mirror the data.

There's no reason external drives should die any faster than an internal drive. Where possible, I tend to buy enclosures and hard drives seperately, meaning I know what's inside for sure and I try to use drives I can insert elsewhere if the enclosure fails so I can get my data back.

From paranoia, it is sometimes a good idea to be ultra careful about switching off these devices, or unplugging them.

[edit]

Ah your issue is external? Damn. I might be lucky... Or more likely, you're unlucky. I'm hoping to never run into this problem; I really do recommend a RAID setup and if you're worried like me about other modes, just use RAID 1, mirroring, because then if one HD fails, you have an exact copy of the data on the other, and you can take it out and use it by itself if you have to, which you cannot do with RAID 5 etc.

[justin3am]

Sickle, I use a Netgear NAS (Network Attached Storage) device which has slots for three or four hard drives that can be configured in a number of RAID formats. I've got 1TB striped and mirrored, it cost me like $1,750 when I got it but I think they are much cheaper now. A partition of it is set up with Time Machine and NetRestore to back up my Macs and the other partition is set up as an Acronis Server, for my PCs. This is the way to go IMO, I have lost hard drives since setting up this system, but I've never lost data. I even had a drive die on the NAS but since it's mirrored it was able to repair itself!

Well worth it!

This is the one I have...

http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage ... ifications

You can get them for like $1400 now. They also have less expensive 2 drive models.

[TheSteven]

I would never personally advise anyone to use anything to store important data on but a Glyph or LaCie drive. That's it. No western digital, no raptor, no maxtor, no seagate, just no.

We have half a cupboard full of dead Lacie external drives at the moment. All of them power supply failures. Funnily enough the WD/Maxtor/Seagate drives inside them all worked fine. Lacie and Glyph make enclosures, not drives.

Yes. The sad truth. I made the same experience. I would never again waste a dollar on a Lacie. I wouldn't mind the occasional power supply failure. What I mind is that it was impossible to have them replaced. No luck at all. And that sucks big time.

I've tried a number of internal & external enclosures for use in backing up the network of my day gig and the only one that I tried that didn't either kill my drives (by overheating them) or die on me are the Vantec NexStar's. Since I started using the NexStar3 I haven't lost a drive or an enclosure. My usage is that I backup every other night at least 60+ gig (depending of what's being backed up). I have 3 backup drives which are rotated on a weekly basis. Backups take between 6 to 12+ hours to complete, and the building owner turns off the A/C evenings & weekends.
You can use whatever Sata drive you prefer and the eSata connection blazes.

[whyterabbyt]

This is the RAID box I use.
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509

Its a fit-your-own-drives box and Ive got two 500Gb drives in it, mirrored, and its hooked up via Gigabit ethernet, which are used for backup of important data, as well as my MP3s and software installers etc. I use an application called SecondCopy to back data up to it automatically.

Vital data like my email also gets backed up to an internal drive partition, and USB drive, also via SecondCopy, and the stuff I couldnt replace on the RAID array gets mirrored the same way. So I have at least two or three copies of everything important.

I also have drive images being done automatically via a front-end to DriveImage_XML.

These days, with external enclosures about £6, any 'old' drive I have gets dropped into a cheap enclosure and used as another backup drive.

I'll probably up the storage in the RAID to 1Tb drives later this year given how cheap they are. The leftover 500Gb drives will be used for longer-term backup too.

Recently I had one of my main hard drives 'burn out' in some mysterious fashion that caused it to fry any motherboard it got connected to. (ie it killed my main non-audio workstation and the older system it replaced) Despite that I didnt lose a single important file.

[Sascha Franck]

This is the RAID box I use.
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509

I've got a question regarding network drives, maybe you can answer it: Do you still need to take care about the format of the drive when you want to access it from both Windows and OSX? With my "plain" external drives I need to use Fat32 to access them from either OS, but what I think is that over a network this should be irrelevant - I mean, I can easily access OSX data under Windows over a network and vice versa, regardless of the formatting of whatever used drives. Is that true for network storage devices as well?
Thanks for any answers.

[whyterabbyt]

This is the RAID box I use.
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509

I've got a question regarding network drives, maybe you can answer it: Do you still need to take care about the format of the drive when you want to access it from both Windows and OSX? With my "plain" external drives I need to use Fat32 to access them from either OS, but what I think is that over a network this should be irrelevant - I mean, I can easily access OSX data under Windows over a network and vice versa, regardless of the formatting of whatever used drives. Is that true for network storage devices as well?
Thanks for any answers.

Yeah, its irrelevant The DLink is basically a small Linux box, and the native drive format is one of the Linux disk formats (ext3 I think). The box does standard apple and windows filesharing, though, so it just appears like any other networked drive, ie same as it would if it were on a Windows/Apple server. (It also does stuff like FTP and working as an iTunes server)

[Sascha Franck]

Yeah, its irrelevant The DLink is basically a small Linux box, and the native drive format is one of the Linux disk formats (ext3 I think). The box does standard apple and windows filesharing, though, so it just appears like any other networked drive, ie same as it would if it were on a Windows/Apple server. (It also does stuff like FTP and working as an iTunes server)

Cool. I already suspected that to be the case, but it's always good to know before.
So, network drive, here I come (in a few days at least).
Thanks for the info!

[camsr]

I use a 3ware 9650SE hardware controller, PCIe 4x and comes in up to 16 channels. My 4 channel does a great job with it's on-board memory for cache writes. RAID 10 is a good option for speed and robustness.

I would love to setup a freebsd box for a file server. All those batch file processes that can't be done under windows are just a script away in freebsd.

[camsr]

I've never tested my raid before but I just found a program to do so, DiskTT. Are these good scores?

[kuniklo]

If you're interested in some other ideas for backup once you (hopefully) do get your data back:

Store your really valuable data (reaktor work etc) on Amazon S3:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

It's super cheap and pretty easy to use. I'm not aware of any automatic backup tools that use it but it's easy enough to drag a copy of your truly precious work over on a regular basis.

As for email, I switched to gmail a while ago. With *my* music on Amazon S3 and my email in Google's cloud I don't worry all that much about data loss any more. I'd lose the mp3 collection if the apartment burned up, but most of that could be replaced if necessary.

[eduardo_b]

I suppose it depends on one's experience as to what feels safe or risky, but I have everything that matters on two external drives that are mirrors and from two different companies. I also burn certain folders to DVDs once in a while (sometimes even two copies). I think external USB drives are just as reliable as internals, and because they aren't being used all the time (mine are off except when I'm accessing them), they should last close to forever given the mean time between failure rates of full-time drives.

It really is unusual to have so many drives go bad, making me wonder if there's some power supply issue -- either internal to the computer or house supply.

Whatever you do, my friend, do not format the drive that's having issues. All that data can be copied unless there's physical damage to the drive. It may be doable using some of the suggested methods noted here, and a data recovery service can get it all back unless the drive has had severe physical damage, but it ain't cheap. Even if you have to wait to get the data off, don't format the drive.

As someone who is about as cautious as it comes about safekeeping data, I'd say you've had an extraordinarily unusual run of bad luck. I truly feel your pain.

[djanthonyw]

I think external USB drives are just as reliable as internals, and because they aren't being used all the time (mine are off except when I'm accessing them), they should last close to forever given the mean time between failure rates of full-time drives.

That's what I thought as well, but last week I turned on both of my WD externals (which I just used for HD image backups) and all of a sudden one of them didn't work anymore. It just made a clicking noise a few times and then the drive would spin down.

I then thought... well maybe the drive is still good, but the enclosure is bad. So I ripped the drive out of the enclosure and I popped it in my Mac Pro. When I turned on the Mac Pro the drive would click a few times and then spin down again, just as in the enclosure. I was not able to get any data off of it.

I personally haven't really had any bad experiences with internal drives and because of this a few days later I purchased a new internal 1TB HD for my Mac Pro to replace my two external drives that I had. The new 1TB internal HD took the spot of an internal 500GB that I had, so I'm now using that one as my system HD now.

My current configuration is like this:

Mac Pro:
Drive 1 - System: 500GB
Drive 2 - Projects: 500GB
Drive 3 - Samples: 500GB
Drive 4 - Backup: 1TB

Mac Book Pro:
Drive 1 - System: 250GB

Disc Backups:
Book 1 - System DVDs
Book 2 - Sample DVDs
Book 3 - Project DVDs

Recently the only thing that has happened with internal drives was the factory 120GB that I had in my Mac Book Pro. When I was doing large file transfers the system would grind to a hault, so I assumed the HD was going and I was right. I purchased a 250GB HD to replace it everything is smooth now.

So basically I would much rather have something that is close to a warning which is what I had with the internal drive. I never got that with the external drive which for no apparent reason just died, and was used a lot less. Again, luckily I was just using it for hard drive image backups...

Two days ago I took both bad HD's (the old laptop and external that I ripped out of it's encloser) and bashed them with a hammer!

I would also like to recommend to people (even if you use HD's for backup), consider using DVD-RW's too. I think they're the best way to backup data actually.