The curse continues

[fivemack]

It seems to be proximity to me, rather than ownership by me, that breaks hard drives; the external drive at work onto which I had laboriously copied 41 DVDs of crystallography images gave up the ghost this week. That's the third this year. I suppose I own about nine drives and they last about five years so I should expect two deaths a year, but I have friends (damerell, nojay) with as many drives who seem to curse their failure less often.

Amazingly and unprecedentedly, this one was within warranty, and Seagate should send a replacement before the decade is out.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I certainly have far less trouble than that. There are, let's see, I guess 16 disks on the shelf above me (though 3 of them are in external cases where they don't spin much). And I've had one disk failure in 7 years. That number has increased during that time, but at least 4 of the disks have been there the whole time.

On the other hand, at work where we have multiple "thumpers" full of disks (48 each) in test systems, we do seem to have to replace a disk a remarkable number of weeks.

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

RAID?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

All the machines that I've been involved in procuring have RAID1 internal discs for just this sort of reason - copying data off physically-defective discs can easily waste a day, discs die faster than computers so in a computer's lifetime its disc will surely die, and a day's wages buy a hard disc.

I haven't thought of RAID1 external, if only because I think of external drives as backup media, and tend to the model of backup that's done rarely and by hand, never deletes a backup, and buys a new drive when the backup drive gets full. If I'm using external drives at work as repositories of lots of live data it might be worth using two ... one on Firewire and one on USB2, and trust that internal bandwidth is enough not to be a bottleneck. Use the warranty replacement drive to mirror the drive purchased to replace it.