Recommend A Back Up Hard Drive

[Davaris]

I'm about to buy a back up harddrive so I can dump my source code and art on it and leave it at my sisters house in case there's a fire or break in at my place.

At the place I'm going to buy it from they have two brands Maxtor and Seagate. Does anyone know which company has a better reputation for these types of things? Or perhaps you can recommend a better company. I want something I can trust.

[PeterM]

My external Maxtor drive failed the other day. But it could have been just one isolated incident, and the drive has been used very heavily for several years.

But anyway, if the other drive is going to sit unused at your sister's house it should last a very long time.

[Speckled Jim]

Ask five different people for a hard drive recommendation and you'll probably get five different answers. For what it's worth I've had a number of failures with Maxtor, and wouldn't touch them again, but no doubt someone will have had a flawless experience with them.

My choice is currently Western Digital. I have had a 250GB external fail, but their Raptors are excellent.

[J.A.W]

My personal favourtite is Seagate. My second manufacturer of choice is Western Digital. Its purely based on my personal experience of puuting together the odd pc over many years, in which i never had a Seagate fail. Worst drive brand of course was IBM with the dreaded Deathstar, 3/3 drives of my drives at the time died :(

[Fabio]

I'm about to buy a back up harddrive so I can dump my source code and art on it and leave it at my sisters house in case there's a fire or break in at my place.

At the place I'm going to buy it from they have two brands Maxtor and Seagate. Does anyone know which company has a better reputation for these types of things? Or perhaps you can recommend a better company. I want something I can trust. By coincidence, they represent almost the two extremes, being Maxtor the worst and Seagate the best IMHO. By even more of a coincidence, the two brands have recently been merged, with Maxtor representing the low-end line and Seagate the high-end, so to speak. The price difference anyway is quite small.

I've had a loooong experience with hard drives (tens and tens, with lotsa failures as well), here's my personal opinion on the brands I know most.

Quality is sorted from worst to best:

1) IBM Deskstar (these were all defective, and IBM then decided to quit the HD business, selling the factories and "know-not-how" to Hitachi). Note that though the 2.5" IBM still kick ass, as the 3.5" before this serious accident (were renowed to be the best before the Deskstar catastrophe). NOTE: I owned about 20-30 of these hard drives (between purchased and refurbished ones during the 3 years warranty period).. all none excluded before or after failed, but I've always been able to recover 99% of the data (dont recall if because of backups or the HD has let me read it with repeated efforts).

2) Hitachi Deskstar (just an IBM probably not even fixed). So 1) should apply as well. Had 2 of them, 1 was dead on arrival, the other has been given away. Dunno what happened to them then.

3) Maxtor: fair but I would never buy one (got one as replacement for one Hitachi of above), I used it only as emergency disk. Currently this PC's main HD is being driven by the Maxtor, but it's a temporary situation (been lasting for two weeks) and it's going to be changed soon. I have experience with several Maxtors (expecially when I worked at a clinic) and definitely had problems (unreadable sectors, bad noises), including one borrowed from an acquaintance that "I" destroyed and then had to pay. Damn Maxtor..

4) Western Digital: simply impressive quality. I had plenty of them and still keep some, I never had any single problem in my life besides.. just once but it has been the very worst HD disaster in my life, making me desperate (because of a temporary big need of space for some video work, I had deleted almost all my backups (I backup on HDs, I almost never backup on DVD anymore due to size issues)). The damn HD decided to die right that moment. On 26th of October 2003 (I still remember, yes) night I turned the PC off and it was absolutely perfect. The morning after I turned it on and the HD was completely wreck. I began a desperate search for an electronic board with that same firmware revision (others won't work). After a true odissey, I found one but the damage was physical, so I gave up the attempts to recover the data, as well as 5 months of hard work.. lost.
Besides this accident WD have been the most impressive and reliable HDs for me.

5) But because of that accident.. I converted all my line (nearly completed only now) to Seagate Barracudas. I have and have had many of them, never had a single problem besides with one HD which suddenly had many read problems, but after some retries and warming up has let me read all the data in it.
However, besides this minor accident, I'm putting all my trust on Seagate now, rather than going again to the Western Digital route (also because these are harder to find at good prices).

My setup is as follows:

My development PC:
1 Seagate Barracuda 300GB-16MB cache (currently a 120GB Maxtor but it's just a temporary situation since I need the two 300GB for some RAID0 operations before I finally install them on this PC and the one below)

My wife's PC:
1 Seagate Barracuda 300GB-16MB cache (currently a Western Digital 120GB-8MBcache but it's just a temporary situation since I need the two 300GB for some RAID0 operations before I finally install them on this PC and the one above)

My server:
1 Seagate Barracuda 120GB-2MBcache
4 Seagate Barracuda 300GB-16MBcache in RAID5 (Ataptec 2400A)

will keep as spare, as emergency drive:
1 Western Digital 120GB-8MBcache

have been recently selling (on eBay):
5 Western Digital 120GB-8MBcache

am going to sell (on eBay)
1 Maxtor 120GB
1 Western Digital 120GB-8MBcache

I'll open and will become a nice toy to play with:
1 Seagate Barracuda 120GB-2MBcache (gives read problems)

Neatly (for me), I've sold (as used) those 120GB HDs on eBay for more than half the price I paid for each 300GB Barracuda, which I've been able to get for only 91 Euro each. Quite convenient mass-upgrade.

I stopped long ago making backups on DVD. I keep the important data redundantly on my PC, my wife's PC and on the RAID5 server. They're connected via gigabit LAN, so file transfer is acceptably fast.

Also, for all but the RAID5 (which is powered off all the time and connected to the server only when necessary) I use removable decks (a ViPower model with 3 fans).
Other than the Adaptec 2400A (RAID5, on the server) I've got also two Adaptec 1200A (RAID0,1) which I use on my and my wife's PC. I use RAID0 for capturing fullres video from my old Hi8 camera without missing frames. Since I'm moving to digital also there (JVC GZ-MC500), I'm freeing these two Seagate 300GB-16cache I've been using to transfer all my old Hi8 tapes, putting them finally on the other two PCs, and then I think I'll move the capture card to the server, and use the RAID5 setup if I'll ever need that disk bandwidth again.

What a long post.. I think I was talking with myself. :P

[Fabio]

My personal favourtite is Seagate. My second manufacturer of choice is Western Digital. Its purely based on my personal experience of puuting together the odd pc over many years, in which i never had a Seagate fail. Worst drive brand of course was IBM with the dreaded Deathstar, 3/3 drives of my drives at the time died :(
Wow.. our experience coincides perfectly. ;)

[Savant]

With hard drives, you'll always be able to find someone who hates a brand and will never buy another and someone else who absolutely loves that brand and swears by it.

A hard drive is like most any other electronic component you'll buy in your lifetime. It will either work or it won't. If it works for the first hour after you bring it home, odds are that you're good to go.

[PoV]

Drives die. Buy two, and Mirror RAID them.

[ggambett]

A couple of Western Digitals (30 and 40 GB) crashed horribly on me a while ago. I usually avoid WDs if I can. Seagates have worked for me. Of course "common knowledge" here suggests brands don't send their best products in terms of quality here, so what you get in the US may be different.

Currently I have a machine dedicated to SVN server, with two hard drives and a script that incrementally backups the repository every night, and which I also write on CD regularly. So at any time I have at least 4 copies of my code (local, two on SVN, CDs).

[dmikesell]

Wow. I've owned two PCs since 1995 (2nd one bought in '01) and never had a single HD failure. Never on any of several work PCs, either. And I leave them running 24x7. Surprised some of you have had so many.

I still back up, though...:D

[Tertsi]

My SATA Seagate Barracuda failed and not too long after, its replacement Hitachi has had many read problems. My current WD Raptor has been the best for me. Clearly faster and so far reliable.

[Savant]

Heh, see? :)

[Jason Chong]

my 1st drive, barracuda udma mode 4. (really old but working drive)

2nd drive, barracuda udma mode 5. (Mostly unused but spins all the time)

My most stable drive will still be my CD writer. I use good decent CD-Rs and backup (data only) occasionally.

I rather not depend on a harddrive for permanent storage. I can't cool a drive below 41 c here (tropical country) even with 2 casing fans front and back unless i turn on the air-con which is going to cost me a lot of money but will reduce temp to 34 c.

[jankoM]

I had one hd crash on a comp. old less than a year and at least one computer + HD destroyed by lightning strike.

I learned 2 lessons:
- don't store nude pics of yourself and your girlfriend on the hd because when they ask you - should we try to recover data - you will probably say... "um... no I had nothing important there" :) and pull you hair out from all that you have lost
- disconect during storm

....you probably know but data on CD is supposed to stay readable only for 2 years....

Otherwise I upload all my important files to webserver and let them (the hosting company) do the daily backups.

[fbomb]

What about a USB flash drive? A SanDisk 2 GB Cruzer Mini is about $80 and a lot more portable.

[BarrySlisk]

I've had 3 WD's and they all broke too soon for my taste (but it was years back when harddisks were <2GBs). This may not aplpy now.

I have 2 broken Quantums lying around and a Samsung (broke within 6 months) and at least 1 Deskstar :)

Maybe all harddisks are crap, or maybe I'm unlucky? My info is of course near useless because I have not kept record of when I bought what and how long it lasted. The latest I bought was a Seagate, so I'm glad people here say they're ok :)

[Nikster]

I bought a maxtor sata which smoked when I powered it up, needless to say it never worked, I got replacement from maxtor and was fine until I had a nightmare fighting with nf4 motherboards along with sata drives after an hour or so it would start to corrupt all data on the HD, but the only drive that I've had go click click vwzmmmmmmmmmmmmm on me was a seagate, the only drive out of twenty and was only 8 gig, but I agree with what savant says you can get what most people says is reliable but it can still go pop :) I guess some form of RAID would be a good idea regardless of brand, or even regular backups to dvd just incase.

[Fabio]

Well, let's put it another way: as far as I know the only manufacturers that give 5 years warranty on all their hard drives are Seagate and Western Digital.

Food for thought..

[Rory]

Wow. I've owned two PCs since 1995 (2nd one bought in '01) and never had a single HD failure. Never on any of several work PCs, either. And I leave them running 24x7. Surprised some of you have had so many.

I still back up, though...:D


you're obviously not kicking your computer on a regular enough basis

:) Whack*

[Artinum]

Wouldn't a few CD/DVD-Roms be a much cheaper and easier to store way of backing up your data? Just replace the backups on a regular basis.

[Davaris]

What about a USB flash drive? A SanDisk 2 GB Cruzer Mini is about $80 and a lot more portable.

I'm storing a lot of data. I'm going to back up all of the commercial CD's I've bought as well.

Wouldn't a few CD/DVD-Roms be a much cheaper and easier to store way of backing up your data? Just replace the backups on a regular basis.

I can use DVD's but I find they are too much trouble (I have to compress a the files and I end up not bothering to do it). As I'm quite lazy about some things (boring), I'm looking for a drag and drop solution.

Worst drive brand of course was IBM with the dreaded Deathstar, 3/3 drives of my drives at the time died

I lost a lot of data on an IBM drive a couple of years back. So far its been my only harddrive crash and its what got me paranoid about doing backups.

Anyway thanks for you replies everyone. It sounds like Seagate is the one I'll go with. :)

[illume]

Drives from a few years ago segate. Haven't bought any new ones since.

Segate drives have a 5 year warranty. Which I think says something.

[luggage]

You could get a NAS drive, different companies make them and they have different features. You can get them with Raid as well, guess it depends on how much you want to spend. With NAS drives you just plug them into your network and they appear as another computer. The one we use is 500GB and can also be plugged directly into a computer via USB 2.0.

[vjvj]

Chalk me up as another guy who has had 3 WD drives die a lot sooner than expected :(

[Mike Boeh]

I am a victim of those stupid deathstar drives too... I had two of them in raid-1, and they died within a week of each other- at less than one year of age.

But let me throw another name out there. I have had 5 Samsung drives, and none of the 5 have ever failed. So that's what I choose for new systems. I have 2 of them in raid-1 in my dev box at the office. At home, I have 2 wd's that are fairly new, but so far, so good. So my uninformed vote is for samsung :D

[Arkadesh]

Segate drives have a 5 year warranty. Which I think says something.

My girlfriend's brand new Barracude died terrible death about few months of use... So there's no rule I'm afraid.

cheers,
Arkadesh

[Jim Buck]

Count me in as one of the guys that has never had a hard drive "die" on him in almost 20 years of using them, though I do have one that has bad sectors from time-to-time that a ScanDisk fixes with no problem. (My current hard drive has been in use almost literally 24/7 for four years now.)

So, I have to ask - what do you guys mean when you say a hard drive "dies" on you? Does smoke literally come out of it? Or, could you leave the hard drive cool off for a week or so and fire it up briefly in order to retrieve important files?

[Davaris]

So, I have to ask - what do you guys mean when you say a hard drive "dies" on you? Does smoke literally come out of it? Or, could you leave the hard drive cool off for a week or so and fire it up briefly in order to retrieve important files?

They stop working and you can't get the data off them ever. You're totally screwed! :) Unless there's a shop in your area with the right equipment. Then they can try and retrieve whats left. In the case of my harddrive it started making tapping sounds just before it stopped working.

[Jason Chong]

*sigh* they don't make em harddrives like they used to, because if they did, they wouldn't be getting any repeat buyers for at least 5 years.

[newobj]

how much data are you looking to store?

if it's small, but very important, have you thought about something like s3?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/102-2762220-0136942?node=16427261

[Fabio]

Wouldn't a few CD/DVD-Roms be a much cheaper and easier to store way of backing up your data? Just replace the backups on a regular basis. When you deal with hundreds of gigas DVD-Roms look like floppies.
Then you also discover that most of them become unreadable after a couple of years (even of good brand and handled and stored ideally).
They aren't even cheaper per byte: at least in Italy we have a big tax on DVD-R's (that goes into the pockets of film industries.. even if I burn my own stuff). I bought each 300GB-16MBcache Seagate drive for just 91 Euro (109 if I didn't have a VAT number). That's 30 EuroCents per gigabyte. It's hard to find in my country a DVD-R cheaper than that. Now talk about the ease of use of an HD vs 70 DVD-R, and it will be straightforward why I do regular backups only on HDs now. I'm so much paranoid that I not only have the same identical data reduntantly on 3 PCs, but one of them is even on RAID5, and it never happens that all of 3 PCs are "ON" in the same moment (you never know, if you get from the electrical company 23000V instead of 230V then you may lose all HDs at once :D ). I'd also like to keep a fourth copy in another house, against fire.. :D :D :D

[Fabio]

I am a victim of those stupid deathstar drives too... I had two of them in raid-1, and they died within a week of each other- at less than one year of age.

But let me throw another name out there. I have had 5 Samsung drives, and none of the 5 have ever failed. So that's what I choose for new systems. I have 2 of them in raid-1 in my dev box at the office. At home, I have 2 wd's that are fairly new, but so far, so good. So my uninformed vote is for samsung :D
By the way, talking about SCSI, on my Amiga1200 I have a Fujitsu that is spinning since 1992 and has never ever given any problem. That's 14 years, ain't it?

[JonC]

Count me in as one of the guys that has never had a hard drive "die" on him...

I'm knocking on wood and crossing my fingers as I write this, but I'm in the same boat. No failures yet using a mix of Maxtor (5-10 years ago) and WD drives (last 5 years).

For CD/DVD backups, There must be some utility that can do this, but you could write a script to zip up your source code and data. Then it's a 2-step process... run the script, then burn the dvd.

[Fabio]

My girlfriend's brand new Barracude died terrible death about few months of use... So there's no rule I'm afraid.
Well, at least you will get a replacement for 5 years. :D :D :D

In any case NOTHING is 100% reliable, neither NASA stuff.

[Fabio]

*sigh* they don't make em harddrives like they used to, because if they did, they wouldn't be getting any repeat buyers for at least 5 years.
Depends.. when your data grows, you need more space anyway. :)

[Nikster]

Short of carving the 1's and 0's in stone you're not going to get a 100% solution, sure, going for a drive with a longer warranty is good for getting another drive but doesn't help the problem of backup data :) as for dvd's not lasting more than two years, my 4 year backups still work fine (not that I need them) but I only back up source code + source data which can fit on cd's.
Also, must suck to buy dvd-r in Italy :( I can get 100 in the uk for 20UKP so for what you paid for your HD I can get 900gig of storage, although I wouldn't fancy having to swap all those to back up large chunks ;)

I guess you really need a multi array raid, and when one drive dies replace pronto, and you should be fine, we all seem to be suffering from the once bitten twice shy regarding brands, rightly so as it's not a nice feeling when all that data disapears.

[Savant]

So, I have to ask - what do you guys mean when you say a hard drive "dies" on you? Does smoke literally come out of it? Or, could you leave the hard drive cool off for a week or so and fire it up briefly in order to retrieve important files?
What usually happens to me is there will be a rather loud click and the computer locks up. I try to reboot it and the hard drive won't boot but will sit there making a "click click click" noise, like the head is trying to move but can't.

Having said that, ever since I started buying and working off of laptops I've never had a problem. I suppose laptop hard drives are tested better or something. I had my last laptop for almost 4 years and never had a single hard drive issue. It's STILL running today as my email computer. My new laptop and my iBook Mac have never had problems either. I have no idea what brand is inside of them and I really don't care. :)

[Fabio]

What usually happens to me is there will be a rather loud click and the computer locks up. I try to reboot it and the hard drive won't boot but will sit there making a "click click click" noise, like the head is trying to move but can't.
That made me immediately think "IBM!". :P

[Savant]

I think most of those drives were Maxtor ... can't remember. Doesn't matter. Just buy a damn laptop. :)

[Mike Boeh]

My IBM drives died with that same "click" noise too!

[Fabio]

Gotta design an original game about it. :)

"Save your data from IBM DeathStar.." *scary* :P

[Speckled Jim]

never had a problem. I suppose laptop hard drives are tested better or something. I had my last laptop for almost 4 years and never had a single hard drive issue. It's STILL running today as my email computer. My new laptop and my iBook Mac have never had problems either. I have no idea what brand is inside of them and I really don't care. :)

I'd probably put that down to laptop drives spinning slower and therefore suffering less wear as well as running cooler.

[Savant]

I dunno, this laptop does 7800 RPM which seems pretty fast to me...

[Fabio]

I'd probably put that down to laptop drives spinning slower and therefore suffering less wear as well as running cooler.
Having to deal with physical shocks, 2.5" HDs are much more robust than 3.5" ones.

[Artinum]

When you deal with hundreds of gigas DVD-Roms look like floppies.

Ah... one advantage of working in a mostly textual environment is that a single CD-Rom can back up months of work! If you have a heavy output of high res graphics or audio samples I can see why you'd need bigger media.

I'm not aware of CDs/DVDs dying after a few years - this can however be the fate of magnetic media (especially cassette tapes). So technically your hard drive should fail first!

I am not very technically minded, though, so I don't know much about the longevity of different mediums. The inventor of the USB system has my gratitude as unscrewing the PC to plug in a new expansion fills me with trepidation...!

[Speckled Jim]

I dunno, this laptop does 7800 RPM which seems pretty fast to me...

It is. It's also quite unusual, most will be 4200 or 5400 RPM.

[Savant]

Well, I was very careful to make sure this hard drive was going to be a fast one. I overlooked that on my last laptop and suffered with 5400 for a long time.

[MibUK]

Short of carving the 1's and 0's in stone you're not going to get a 100% solution.
But 'cp -Rf /home/* /dev/stonecutter' takes an age!

[Jim Buck]

Well, Murphy must have been reading my posts in this thread since my laptop hard drive just died. Ironically, I bought a new laptop hard drive and was going to image the old one to the new one this weekend.

Anyway, the hard drive is doing the loud "click of death" thing and won't boot up. Can a data recovery firm do anything with this? How much can I expect to pay? It's a 30gb laptop hard drive that I would ideally love to see imaged onto this new hard drive (exact same hard drive).

[illume]

Just a couple more notes...

If you let your hard drives sleep when not being used I think they last longer. It also makes your computer quieter.

Keep your drives apart in the case. Keep it away from the CD, and other drives. This is so it won't over heat.

If your hd begins clunking, stop your computer. Then let it cool before starting up again. Maybe try and improve your computers temperature before starting it up again.

Sometimes if you unplug the hd power cable, then plug it back in you will notice it will stop clunking. Not whilst it is running of course!

If running *nix rsync is your friend. You can automate backups to local drives, network drives, or a computer on the internet.

Automating backups is vital. Otherwise they will not get done.

Test your restore process! If you don't test it, you are gambling.

Try and not use much if any of your swap partition. This will mean your computer is faster, and your drive will do much less work. The theory is that if your drive does less work, then it will last longer.

I use the write cache, and DMA on my hard drive. This seems to make the hard drive do less work. Again, the less work it does the longer it will last.

Look out for early warnings that your hardware will fail. Often it doesn't completely fail right away, but will begin to corrupt data first. Once you notice it is failing replace it.

In linux you may see messages like this in your logs.
end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 4951737
EXT3-fs error (device hdb5): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=106727, block=229383



This is how you make them sleep in debian... the spindown_time attribute is the one to look at. Read the hdparm man page for details on what the numbers mean.

edit /etc/hdparm.conf

/dev/hda {
mult_sect_io = 16
write_cache = on
dma = on
io32_support = 1
spindown_time = 241
}

Sometimes trying a different operating system can help. I have put linux live CDs in some machines and been able to access drives. Sometimes just being able to copy off the non corrupt data. Since the live CD doesn't read the hard drive to get the operating system going, you can then access some of the data on the HD. Or sometimes the clicking stopped. I guess it has something to do with the different ways OS's can access hard drives(different pci timings etc).

As a last, final, completely given up resort. After you have decided that you're going to chuck the HD in the bin, try the atari drop. Hold the hard drive 2-3 feet above the ground then release. You'd be supprised how often this can fix something! If only temporarily sometimes. Or not at all.