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Hard Disk Crash

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  • C Christian Graus

    I've had plenty. I use Norton Ghost to back up my files as I work.

    Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.

    R Offline
    R Offline
    Rob Philpott
    wrote on last edited by
    #8

    Different subject, your signature 'Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.' How's that going? How do you do ordinary stuff ie. Visual Studio? Parallels?

    Regards, Rob Philpott.

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    • R Rob Philpott

      Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?

      Regards, Rob Philpott.

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      peterchen
      wrote on last edited by
      #9

      A few - either accumulating bad sectors (noticed usually as "computer gets slow" on clients), or fried to death by dying cheap PSUs.

      Personally, I love the idea that Raymond spends his nights posting bad regexs to mailing lists under the pseudonym of Jane Smith. He'd be like a super hero, only more nerdy and less useful. [Trevel]
      | FoldWithUs! | sighist

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      • R Rob Philpott

        Who made the drives out of interest?

        Regards, Rob Philpott.

        OriginalGriffO Offline
        OriginalGriffO Offline
        OriginalGriff
        wrote on last edited by
        #10

        Fujitsu I think - can't remember the models though.

        No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced. This message is made of fully recyclable Zeros and Ones

        "I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
        "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt

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        • P peterchen

          A few - either accumulating bad sectors (noticed usually as "computer gets slow" on clients), or fried to death by dying cheap PSUs.

          Personally, I love the idea that Raymond spends his nights posting bad regexs to mailing lists under the pseudonym of Jane Smith. He'd be like a super hero, only more nerdy and less useful. [Trevel]
          | FoldWithUs! | sighist

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          R Offline
          Rob Philpott
          wrote on last edited by
          #11

          Interesting - second person who said their drives were taken out by a PSU. I've never heard of that before.

          Regards, Rob Philpott.

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          • R Rob Philpott

            Different subject, your signature 'Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.' How's that going? How do you do ordinary stuff ie. Visual Studio? Parallels?

            Regards, Rob Philpott.

            C Offline
            C Offline
            Christian Graus
            wrote on last edited by
            #12

            It's parallels now, because VMWare became useless. Parallels is not much better, but I use Parallels to run my Boot Camp partition inside OSX, and then I boot to Windows when I need to. It's working fine, I do enjoy being on Mac for my day to day computing, and using Windows only when I have to.

            Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.

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            • R Rob Philpott

              Yikes! Both disks at once?! The only way I envisaged that happening was if the computer was stolen. Perhaps you were just very, very unlucky...

              Regards, Rob Philpott.

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              smcnulty2000
              wrote on last edited by
              #13

              Rob Philpott wrote:

              Perhaps you were just very, very unlucky...

              Or perhaps just one of those 'very'. They were put under a great deal of voltage with almost no protection. I can't blame the poor devils for frying. Sometimes you just get a lemon component. If its critical what you have is a 'wet cleanup in aisle 3'. Neither drive was redundant anyway. One was a small, fast SATA for games and a few other things, the other was slower but much bigger and held tons of apps that didn't need speed. And docs, music, and my Knowledge Base directories.

              _____________________________ I've often heard of an older, wiser person passing the torch. After witnessing something like that, I'm not sure who'd want the thing.

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              • R Rob Philpott

                Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?

                Regards, Rob Philpott.

                J Offline
                J Offline
                Jorgen Andersson
                wrote on last edited by
                #14

                If you make a search on it you'll find that there is quite a lot of statistics on harddrive failures. Usually they break during the first three months or when they're older than 3 years. According to Google, who's having quite a few harddrives to make statistics on, their failure rate is 1 in every 17 drives.

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                • R Rob Philpott

                  Interesting - second person who said their drives were taken out by a PSU. I've never heard of that before.

                  Regards, Rob Philpott.

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                  T Offline
                  thinicezero
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #15

                  A rogue PSU can fry anything in the PC. We've seen motherboards, HDs, PCI cards, optical drives individually taken down by PSU failures. As for backing up my HD I do an NTBACKUP of the entire system to external USB drive overnight, keeping at least half a dozen backup file on there. Also use Mozy remote backup solution to keep a copy of my 'development' folder. R

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                  • R Rob Philpott

                    Interesting - second person who said their drives were taken out by a PSU. I've never heard of that before.

                    Regards, Rob Philpott.

                    S Offline
                    S Offline
                    smcnulty2000
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #16

                    Oh, and to top it off mine wasn't a cheap PSU. My new one is, however. My thought: If I'm not going to get my money's worth from the thing then why pay more? It was expensive, it was from Antec, as I recall.

                    _____________________________ I've often heard of an older, wiser person passing the torch. After witnessing something like that, I'm not sure who'd want the thing.

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                    • R Rob Philpott

                      Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?

                      Regards, Rob Philpott.

                      T Offline
                      T Offline
                      Tom Deketelaere
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #17

                      Rob Philpott wrote:

                      'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly

                      That depends on what you want. I have a simple 500gig NAS system at home (well not exactly industry grade NAS but hell enough for the important stuff) that basicly is 2 hard drives that copy each other, k still a chance of everything going wrong but having 2 hard drives fail at the same moment would be a clear indication that the universe is against me and that I should stop fighting it ;P

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                      • J Jorgen Andersson

                        If you make a search on it you'll find that there is quite a lot of statistics on harddrive failures. Usually they break during the first three months or when they're older than 3 years. According to Google, who's having quite a few harddrives to make statistics on, their failure rate is 1 in every 17 drives.

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                        A Offline
                        AspDotNetDev
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #18

                        Jörgen Andersson wrote:

                        their failure rate is 1 in every 17

                        Fight Club narrator said:

                        On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

                        Visual Studio is an excellent GUIIDE.

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                        • R Rob Philpott

                          Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?

                          Regards, Rob Philpott.

                          S Offline
                          S Offline
                          Stuart Dootson
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #19

                          No - but that doesn't stop the (disimilar) backups...

                          1. TimeMachine to a Firewire disk - that stays plugged in all the time my Macbook Pro's at my home 'workstation'
                          2. CarbonCopyCloner to a Firewire disk - I update that image every couple of weeks or so
                          3. Backup to a NAS drive - just things like photos - I use a home-brew script that uses rsync (which is uber-cool in a very geeky way, IMO) as the underlying sychronisation technology).

                          And I'm intending getting another Firewire drive to get 'off-site' backup capability - just not sure whether I should use TimeMachine or Carbon Copy Cloner as the backup mechanism.

                          Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p

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                          • R Rob Philpott

                            Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?

                            Regards, Rob Philpott.

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                            Dave Parker
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #20

                            I've had the opposite experience, I've never had a HD crash until this year. I still have loads of old drives that probably still work but are kinda useless due to their now small capacity. Earlier this year the HD in my media center just suddenly became undetectable by the BIOS - tried it in another machine and nothing can detect it anymore even though the disk still spins up when receiving power. If you have 3 disks you could use something like trueimage to image things to a different drive periodically - it doesn't seem to add much overhead compared to other backup solutions I've seen which slow the computer down a lot while running. Personally I only have 1 HD in mine (mostly due to concerns over increased noise and higher power consumption with having more). I backup over my LAN to a different machine. BTW I've heard that when multiple HDs are in the same machine there is a tendency for them to all fail at the same time - I don't know how true that is but it's probably better to back up to a different machine on your LAN if that's feasible.

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                            • T Tom Deketelaere

                              Rob Philpott wrote:

                              'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly

                              That depends on what you want. I have a simple 500gig NAS system at home (well not exactly industry grade NAS but hell enough for the important stuff) that basicly is 2 hard drives that copy each other, k still a chance of everything going wrong but having 2 hard drives fail at the same moment would be a clear indication that the universe is against me and that I should stop fighting it ;P

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                              D Offline
                              Dave Parker
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #21

                              I've never seen any attractively priced NAS devices that are decent (support standard windows file shares, more than 1 HDD etc), they always seem to be more expensive than a full computer system. I bought a cheap one a few years ago for about £20 into which I can put a single IDE HDD and has an ethernet and USB connector. When saving files to it over the network though it just seems to corrupt nearly every file that's placed on it.

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                              • OriginalGriffO OriginalGriff

                                Oh yes. About two years ago, my wifes HDD failed out-of-the-blue. Replaced. Then about a month later mine went. Same make, same model. It happens, HDD failure is probably the most common hardware fault in a PC other than "I poured juice in my keyboard". Probably because they have mechanical systems as well as electronic. Back up. Do it now! Well backed up computers rarely fail!

                                No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced. This message is made of fully recyclable Zeros and Ones

                                B Offline
                                B Offline
                                Brady Kelly
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #22

                                OriginalGriff wrote:

                                "I poured juice in my keyboard".

                                Sniff. I still have one dead laptop caused by 'juice' (Smirnoff Storm) on the keyboard, and the HDD, and the mobo, and the battery, and the DVD. It's amazing how far 330ml can spread. All four walls of my bedroom even still have small splash-marks.

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                                • A AspDotNetDev

                                  Jörgen Andersson wrote:

                                  their failure rate is 1 in every 17

                                  Fight Club narrator said:

                                  On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

                                  Visual Studio is an excellent GUIIDE.

                                  J Offline
                                  J Offline
                                  Jorgen Andersson
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #23

                                  True, I guess Google isn't keeping theirs long enough.

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                                  • R Rob Philpott

                                    Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?

                                    Regards, Rob Philpott.

                                    E Offline
                                    E Offline
                                    ednrg
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #24

                                    The fact that your backup drives are in your computer is a little troubling. One nice spike from your power supply, and goodbye data. I have a few USB cases and I backup my data to these drives. When the backup is completed, I unplug and disconnect the drives and place them in the desk.

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                                    • R Rob Philpott

                                      Interesting - second person who said their drives were taken out by a PSU. I've never heard of that before.

                                      Regards, Rob Philpott.

                                      P Offline
                                      P Offline
                                      peterchen
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #25

                                      Modern PSU's don't apply a transformer but voltage regulators (better price, weight, efficiency).If these fail the output voltage goes UP AND UP AND OOOOOHHHHH POOOF!

                                      Personally, I love the idea that Raymond spends his nights posting bad regexs to mailing lists under the pseudonym of Jane Smith. He'd be like a super hero, only more nerdy and less useful. [Trevel]
                                      | FoldWithUs! | sighist

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                                      • P peterchen

                                        Modern PSU's don't apply a transformer but voltage regulators (better price, weight, efficiency).If these fail the output voltage goes UP AND UP AND OOOOOHHHHH POOOF!

                                        Personally, I love the idea that Raymond spends his nights posting bad regexs to mailing lists under the pseudonym of Jane Smith. He'd be like a super hero, only more nerdy and less useful. [Trevel]
                                        | FoldWithUs! | sighist

                                        D Offline
                                        D Offline
                                        Dan Neely
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #26

                                        You'll need multiple failures on a better PSU which will monitor the regulation and pull the plug if it goes haywire.

                                        The latest nation. Procrastination.

                                        P 1 Reply Last reply
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                                        • R Rob Philpott

                                          Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?

                                          Regards, Rob Philpott.

                                          S Offline
                                          S Offline
                                          snowman53
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #27

                                          I've had five or six HD failures over the last year. Most were of the data recoverable type, but one was a true unrecoverable crash that took down my web server.

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