portable hard drive fails from under use

[pctech]

Just plugged in my Toshiba hard drive enclosure (which in fact contains a Western Digital drive or at least thats what the system reported) and switched it on and cant get the drive to spin up although got a blue power light on the enclosure.

So looks like I'll have to either buy a new drive plus enclosure (easiest option) or get my tools out and replace the drive in this one.

Might just be easier to replace the whole unit but the tip is here, make sure you use it often.

[Rik]

I've not had an internal HD fail in years, Mitch, but I find he external drives much less reliable. I've never been able to work out why.

[pctech]

I bought what I thought would be a good quality one but it appears not to be.

[Glenn]

I've not had an internal HD fail in years, Mitch, but I find he external drives much less reliable. I've never been able to work out why.

They tend to be treated better when fitted in a laptop/computer, rather than in a bag.

[pctech]

Mine hasn't moved from on top of my tower chassis so it's not been bumped about.

[Glenn]

As it is not working Mitch, give the drive a firm tap, it may just be stiction.

[pctech]

Hmm, heard that before will do now.

[pctech]

Nope its definitely dead.

[Rik]

They tend to be treated better when fitted in a laptop/computer, rather than in a bag.

Same here.

[Steve]

I wouldn't guarantee that the blue light means the power supply is ok.

[Technical Ben]

Oh, so have you tested it in a pc? (taking it out of the caddy?)
My laptop blew a couple of USB devices before it also died. Thankfully, I rescued the portable HDD out of the caddy, and it now sits in my pc.

[Lance]

Stick it in the freezer and see if that helps

[john]

I've also got a Toshiba external drive that I haven't used for well over a year. Hope it starts again when I eventually do try it, if not thanks for the above tips.

[Gary]

I have a Lacie 500GB external few years old now, use it for time machine backups, not saying anything else to tempt fate 

[Niall]

I haven't used western digital for years as main drives. They always failed on me within a year of light/average use. Off the top of my head, and because I'm knackered, I can't remember the brand I use but I think it's Samsung.

{edit} I'm lying, my back up drive isn't WD, it's also Samsung. I really need sleep. Tra!

[pctech]

The drive in my current system is a Maxtor DiamondMax and its been great thus far (lot of Maxtor drives in the older servers at work too I believe) but sadly they were borged by Seagate, I've never found them to be that reliable.

Might go for a Samsung based one next time but make sure I power it up with the system.

[Glenn]

Seagate are rumoured to be a takeover target for WD, Samsung or Hitachi.

[Rik]

Soon there will just be one manufacturer...

[Glenn]

Highlander 

[pctech]

Oh yeah Hitachi are another brand to avoid.

Allegedly it was the failure of a Hitachi Data Systems RAID controller that brought a good proportion of Barclays' ATMs plus online banking down not once but twice.

[Glenn]

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/05/seagate-reportedly-turned-down-takeover-bid-from-western-digital/

[pctech]

Soon there will just be one manufacturer...

And my money's on it being Chinese then God help us.

[pctech]

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/05/seagate-reportedly-turned-down-takeover-bid-from-western-digital/

Maybe they'll launch a hostile takeover.

[Rik]

And my money's on it being Chinese then God help us.

Korean might be a more risky source, at least in terms of reliability of supply, Mitch.

[pctech]

With the recent issues I've had I've started looking at online backup services.

I am aware of the free SkyDrive but what MS giveth, MS can taketh away without warning so been looking at paid solutions.

Zen have an offering which might work well as the backup servers are effectively 'local' network wise but have been also looking at the EMC owned Mozy service which appears to offer the advantage of being able to request a copy of files on a DVD to facilitate a restore.

Just wondered if anyone uses the service?

[Rik]

I've never felt safe entrusting my data to others, Mitch.

[pctech]

In a way I agree but I'm just concerned about shelling out another 60 quid on a drive.

TBH I trust Zen more than an American storage device corporation even though a tracert shows the servers appear to be in Ireland but I'd be a little concerned about exhausting my broadband allowance if I had to do a restore.

[Rik]

Plus the speed of the backup is going to be slow.

[Ray]

I agree, Rik, I recently tried out Idrive online storage and to just backup my Outlook pst file of about 1.5GB took nearly 8 hours, I gave it up as a waste of time in the end. With the upload speeds most BB users have it's a total waste of time if you've got a significant amount of data to back up and forget it if you want to back up the whole PC.

[Rik]

Fibre will make it viable, Ray, but anything less and you're going to need a lot of patience.

[Ray]

Indeed, Rik, it should.

[Glenn]

And while you are backing up your .pst file, you use Outlook.

[Technical Ben]

Fibre will make it viable, Ray, but anything less and you're going to need a lot of patience.

I'm guessing, by then, we will be using High Def Video recorders. So that wedding video you want to back up, in 3D, is 30GB alone. Technology moving on and all that. 

[pctech]

Zen are offering a free 14 day trial so I might give it a whirl.

[Steve]

Might be time for one back up

[Rik]

[Ray]

 

[pctech]

It'll do incremental apparently, I may just leave the PC on overnight and let it do its thing.

[Rik]

You mean hatch devilish plots against you?

[pctech]

Perhaps, especially as I've been researching its replacement 

[Rik]

 

[Glenn]

Would this be of interest Mitch? http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/intenso-1tb-2-5-usb-portable-extern/826152

[pctech]

Cheers, looking at the further info on the backup products it looks like the first backup could take some time.

[armadillo]

I would not want to use a HD that is powered by USB. Better to use external power. I use a standard internal hard drive but in an external enclosure.

Take your pick from any standard internal HD from 1TB to 3TB

http://www.scan.co.uk/Shop/Computer-Hardware/All/Hard-Drives-Int/SATA-I-and-II-1TB-3TB

and an enclosure - I use these

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-box-ib-351astu-b-black-aluminium-for-35-pata-and-sata-hdd-plus-usb-20-interface

It comes with a mains power supply.

I have about eight of them. Never had one fail in about as many years. Every time bigger drives come down to a sensible price, I buy one and back up my smaller drives onto it. That way I progressed from 300GB drives to 1.5TB ones. It means everything can be backed up more than once. I see there are now 3TB drives but they are stupidly expensive. 1TB ones are pretty cheap now though.

[Rik]

Next year, the 3TB drives will be, Dill. Think how many copies of my first, 10MB, HD I could fit on one of them - and it cost me £300 in 1982!

[Steve]

I've got a few external 1TBs , and not had any issues yet, great for backups and a clone of the backup.

[Rik]

I wonder how many backup copies we make on average. For me, it's 4 external HDs and one internal daily, plus a further weekly backup. All changed data files are backed up daily, the weekly includes an image of the apps & data drives, I do weekly Acronis images of the OS drive.

[Technical Ben]

HDD prices are so cheap, I cannot see online storage competing.
Why not go for a hot swappable raid server? Raid with redundancy, so if one drive fails, it repairs its self.
You can get cheap 2 disk NAS boxes. These would only support raid 1 or 0. So your only going to get a single copy for backup in a HDD failure. So, 2TB total storage, is 1TB storage, 1TB backup (50%).
With a more expensive NAS box, you can put in more drives, with 3 or more drives, you can use RAID 5 (or 3, 4 ect, but RAID 5 seems best).
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132657
You can loose 1 disk, and keep all your files. You have 3TB of space, for example. This gives you a better 2TB storage, with 1TB for backup (30% for the backup). Each drive you add increases the amount you can use for storage, and less for backup.

[pctech]

Well, I 'did the math' as they say in Uncle Sam's backyard and a year's subscription to Zen's service is cheaper than an external HDD and the data is backed up on two sets of servers that are geographically diverse and protected by 448-bit blowfish encryption so have taken the plunge and the software is currently building the backup set which is about 2.93GB in size.

Going to leave the machine running overnight to let it upload.

[Technical Ben]

I wonder if my 80gb* would be economical?

Well, I would not need a online service for family pictures. I'd prefer to do entire drives/computers. So HDD seem the only option for me. 

(*No idea how big it is, but my art folder, mainly of digital artwork I've done is nearly 5GB as it is. That's without programs and everything else)

[esh]

HDD motors go all the time (this will give you an OK power light but no spin-up). Honestly, you can't do statistics on a handful of drives. If you've encountered hundreds (preferably thousands) then you can probably give real structure to what you find. I've had 6 WDC drives go vs 2 Maxtors, but I almost always prefer the WDC ones. I don't think they are less reliable (in fact, more so). Weirdly, if you have a drive that is having trouble spinning up, I have put them in the fridge before and found this has brought two drives (temporarily) back to life. It also worked for one friend of mine too. I am not sure whether this is a fluke yet, but there is a vague physical hand-wavey argument for that it might do *something* at least.

I never bothered looking into online backup services. 1TB+ would not only be costly but take forever on a home connection. I use RAID setups of drives nowadays with one full backup.

[Technical Ben]

The accepted idea is that most faliures are either, platter crashes (not usually fixable) or component failures.
With component failures, it might be a tiny wire or circuit that has cracked. Or a transistor/capacitor overheating and warping it shape, loosing connection. So a quick dump in the freezer will cause metal parts to contract, hopefully regaining contact. Then you have a little while until it starts to bend or crack again.

I do know the cold effects magnets too, but doubt these kind of temperatures are doing anything there.
Google had some good data on how to backup, and how many drives fail.
The usual "have a second hardcopy" as a live backup system, such as raid, can always fail due to a power cut.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/
and if you google it, you gets tonsof data to crunch. :F
http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=google+hard+drive+reliability&aq=0&aqi=g1g-o1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=8d8451eb556d4e24

Oh, and the wiki article on data backup also suggests, having too many small HDDs is worse than having 2 or 3 large ones. As the more drives you have, the more likely it is you will break one of them. 

[Gary]

Oh yeah Hitachi are another brand to avoid.

Allegedly it was the failure of a Hitachi Data Systems RAID controller that brought a good proportion of Barclays' ATMs plus online banking down not once but twice.

Had an Hitachi in my Voodoo that is still going from what I hear, 5 years and counting Mitch, thing is the old IBM deathstar Deskstar gave Hitachi that tag as they took that brand on just like the bodged firmware on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives. I think most drives have equal chance to fail or live these days, some batches are bad some good, luck of the draw.

[Rik]

I find that USB bus-powered drives tend to fail more than self-powered.

[Gary]

I find that USB bus-powered drives tend to fail more than self-powered.

I avoid them, Rik. The worse drives I ever had were external Maxtors and a few external WD ones, but that was years back, they all seem pretty much the same now, the Seagate 7200.12 1TB  are only two platters like many big drives these days so density is better.

[Technical Ben]

Strange. Some of those articles were saying Hitachi were the best. But as said. It all depends on setup, external or internal, and which model you get.

[Rik]

I avoid them, Rik. The worse drives I ever had were external Maxtors and a few external WD ones, but that was years back, they all seem pretty much the same now, the Seagate 7200.12 1TB  are only two platters like many big drives these days so density is better.

I like dense, it makes me feel at home.

[Ray]

 

[pctech]

I called a halt to the backup at 2 a.m. this morning as think there was a lot of garbage in there bulking it out.

[Rik]

That's the trouble with modern hard drives, Mitch, space is so cheap that we don't bother to clean out old files.

[pctech]

Going to sit and go through my My Documents folder over the weekend and then give it another go, am on a trial at the minute so not as if its actually cost me anything.

[Rik]

I have documents going back to 1989 - I hoard!

[armadillo]

I called a halt to the backup at 2 a.m. this morning as think there was a lot of garbage in there bulking it out.

I do not quite understand why you need an on-line backup if your data volume is as small as I thought you said. You said the backup was 2.93GB. Maybe that is just a test. But that kind of volume you could backup in 15 minutes onto a pen drive that costs about £5. True it would not give you geographic diversity.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-dane-elec-pearl-silver-usb-20-pendrive-retail

That is a USB pen drive 4GB for £5. Why not buy three of them and then you can have three backups, used in rotation so you overwrite the oldest one each time you make a new backup?

Seems like an ideal solution for small volumes of data like a few GB. Not practical for terrabytes though!

I did wonder about farming out some of my external drives to friends for location diversity. Trouble is, my friends are not geeky like me and they would just think I am weird! (Which is probably true).

[Technical Ben]

Or leave it in a bank... no, don't do that, over kill and WAY more expensive.
Hmmm. I can see a business plan here, gap in the market...

[pctech]

I am probably going to use DVDs for now.

[Rik]

Don't trust RWs, Mitch.

[pctech]

TBH thats why I was looking at an online backup solution so it couldn't be lost or wiped by being too near something magnetic.

[Rik]

Like me, you mean.

[pctech]

 

[esh]

Oh, and the wiki article on data backup also suggests, having too many small HDDs is worse than having 2 or 3 large ones. As the more drives you have, the more likely it is you will break one of them. 

Unless it is RAID of course. Excluding RAID-0.

Even without RAID, the question is do you prefer to lose *some* data with a greater likelihood by spreading your backup around, or lose it entirely with less chance by putting it on a single drive?

I never run unraided drives on workstations or backups at all anymore. It's just too dangerous.

[Technical Ben]

TBH thats why I was looking at an online backup solution so it couldn't be lost or wiped by being too near something magnetic.

Been fine since we moved off of tape. Never heard of a HDD dying that way. Unless it's a super magnet.

Oh, and EVEN on raid esh. The core problem is, the more components you have, the more complicated the setup. The more complication, the more likely it is to fail. So if 1 in 10 drives fail, and you have a raid of 10 drives, one will fail. However, if you only have 5 drives, your twice as safe as before. So you keep your data, but are forever replacing dud drives. Maths/statistics is strange like that.

[esh]

Right, I missed your point. Yes that's true. But drives are cheap! Though SSDs are meant to last a few hundred years or so. I'll report back in 2300 and let you know how it's going!

[armadillo]

I inherently mistrust RAID as a method of backup. I absolutely agree with pctech about complexity.

My view on RAID is this. The ideal use for RAID is when you need (at least a fighting chance to maintain) continuous on-line availability of data. An on-line air ticket reservation system, for instance, depends on continuous uptime. So you update a RAID array. Then if a drive fails, the data should still be available on-line until the failed devices can be restored or replaced.

But I do not regard that as a backup policy and I consider it makes a dangerous backup policy. When RAID fails, it often fails catastrophically. TBB lost an entire RAID system a while back. Its purpose is not backup. Its purpose is continuous on-line availability. No other storage method can provide that. But to provide backup, you need data storage that is logically and physically independent of the data being backed up. RAID very obviously does not provide that. Its viability depends on the successful operation of interlinked components. So for ensuring no data loss, it is at least as dangerous as not backing up at all.

I believe a good strategy in an on-line system is to use RAID to provide, or to have the chance to provide, continuous availability of prime data and to use backup to devices that are not part of the RAID array as a means to guard against data loss.

I go so far as to say that RAID is not a backup mechanism at all. If you use RAID, your data is not backed up. It is just provided in a package to maximise the chance of continuous availability if one of the drives fails.

That is my opinion, anyway!

[pctech]

RAID was developed before I cared much about computers but as 'dillo says it is my understanding that its primary reason for development was to provide a mechanism for orderly automatic failover in the event of a disk device failing in a server/disk array, however due to the constant replication required to maintain a perfect mirror image of the primary disk all disk device in the array are placed under the same duty (OS writes to primary disk and RAID writes a copy to each other disk in the array) so the wear and tear is likely to be equal on a heavy duty system so it does not negate the need for a backup.

In a lot of organisations including my own employer RAID maybe used in the front end servers to provide OS uptime but business data is often stored on large Storage Area Network devices which use their own proprietary OS and file systems but which are also regularly backed up.

[armadillo]

Oops. Glad you agree Mitch. I also apologise to Technical Ben for mis-attributing his comment on complexity. Sorry Ben!

[pctech]

Indeed yes I noticed that too but didn't want to say anything 

[Rik]

Right, I missed your point. Yes that's true. But drives are cheap! Though SSDs are meant to last a few hundred years or so. I'll report back in 2300 and let you know how it's going!

I can't guarantee being able to reply.

[Rik]

But I do not regard that as a backup policy and I consider it makes a dangerous backup policy. When RAID fails, it often fails catastrophically. TBB lost an entire RAID system a while back.

IDNet's mail server failed a couple or so years ago, when two drives in a RAID failed simultaneously. In theory, the RAID should have provided failover, but the second failure prevented that. It was, undoubtedly, a very rare set of circumstances, but as an American friend of mine used to sat, Ship Hattens.

I'd also never trust RAID as a backup medium, I believe in keeping that simple, ie multiple drives which are physically stored off site.

[nowster]

IDNet's mail server failed a couple or so years ago, when two drives in a RAID failed simultaneously.

This is why, when specifying drives for a RAID array, you never have all the drives from the same manufacturing batch.

[Rik]

Life should be easier, shouldn't it.

[Technical Ben]

This is why, when specifying drives for a RAID array, you never have all the drives from the same manufacturing batch.

Or leave a cup of coffee on of the Array.  

[Rik]