I've just had a Western Digital 240 GB IDE HD fail on my home built desktop PC running XP. It's about 5 years old and only used perhaps 2 hours a day on average. What make should I go for as a replacement?
One of the HDs on my workshop RISC OS machine is a Conor and about 15 years old. ;-)
To be honest, that is about par for the course for most commercial grade hard disks these days.
A friend who runs 24x7 massive mathematical matrix computations,mthat involve constant disk access (matrices too big for memory), gets a year if he is lucky.
Seagate maybe a bit better, But none are great.
Luck of the draw. SCSI disks are generally better, but you pay the price.
I am not sure about XP, but on Linux, my solution is to run twin disks with a nightly Rsync backup of the important data and so on.
That way when one or other disks goes, I can rapidly rebuild a new machine, and get the data - my work - back, and most of the configuration as well, which speeds up the new machine rebuild.
Disk failure should be expected at any time after about 3 years. And planned for.
Every make seems to go through a phase of making duff drives. Popular current suggestions seem to be Samsung (I've got a couple here - 500Gb and 1TB and both seem fine), Hitachi and WD Green drives.
I've mostly recently got one of the latter and it really does run beautifully quiet and cool - maybe a little bit of a sacrifice in the speed dept, but I can't say I notice any difference from the last one - for the use it has as a data drive I don't think I'd notice anyway.
Well, planned for at any time. There are multiple backup options here
I think the only way to win at that game might be to buy NOS drives that are a few years old - ones that have proven reliability in the field.
I think my oldest ones are about 25 now, but not powered up for a couple of years.
I always used to buy SCSI - not only did I have no reliability problems (the only times I retired drives were for capacity/speed upgrades), but there were advantages in physical configuration too.
I've kind of got stuck with SATA at the moment because all my SCSI stuff's still in storage over in the UK, and I don't want to buy a whole bunch of new controllers, cables, drives etc.
I rsync weekly, but to a removable drive which I normally keep separate from the server; I should really get a second non-removeable drive and rsync to that more frequently...
Typically I just copy /home and /etc, but I should really do a snapshot of all my binaries too just to speed things up if there was a disaster (with the SCSI systems I used to run a separate OS drive and data drive, but with the way capacities are these days it's impossible to buy a drive that's nicely "OS-sized")
I have a friend who's had 2 out of 2 early failures of WD drives. Not sure which model they were, but they were 24x7 use.
I have one 250GB Samsung which has been running 24x7 for 3 years, and is still OK. 3 of them ran 24x7 for 1 year, but two got swapped out when I needed more space (still working fine though).
Moved to Seagate 500GB drives for a year, and no problems with them. Bought two more to use as backup, and one is DoA.
Then moved to Hitachi Ultrastor 1TG, for best part of a year, and they've been fine. Bought a cheap slow Samsung 1TB for backup, and it seems to have lots of problems when I queue up lots of commands on it, looks more like buggy firmware than media.
I have some 30 year old CDC LARKs, which still work fine, and they have exchangable platters!
Hardware RAID card? Depends on your budget. Steer clear of cheap ones, had no end of hassle with them. Adaptec were always good (but expensive) - no idea if that's still the case. Also, you might have trouble finding one with the correct flavour of PCI for an older machine...
In terms of HDs, just assume they will die. Some might last longer than others but they will all expire at the least convenient time (unless on a raid setup and hot swappable. Then they will run for ever.... sods law). Recently I've had good experiences from Samsung and Hitachi - bad from WD. Saying that, we had another Hitachi SATA drive die last night in our SAN at under a year old :-)
There are certainly different classes of drives as well. If you are looking for old flavour IDE then you might be limited. SAS likely to be better than SATA (SAS controllers more expensive though).
Isn't something like that the basis of RAID servers? That's where there are a number of hard disks all containing identical information. When one disk fails, no information is lost, and I think it can even be hot-swapped for a new one.
As will now be obvious, I'm no IT expert, but my business PC and several others are networked to a RAID server specifically to offer greater security of data. I did this after a portable hard drive failed losing many images. That cost us several thousand pounds and we decided to take steps to avoid data loss from hard drives in future.
Obviously, the RAID server doesn't solve the problem of data loss from a portable drive. It just reminded us that if we lost the data on our server because of hard disk failure, we would be well and truly fscked. ;-)
Do you mean on-the-fly, or just whenever you decide to do it?
For the former, some kind of RAID card. For the latter, depends on OS.
In linux, if it were identical drives I'd just use dd; if not I'd slap a minimal OS on the 'secondary' drive initially and then periodically rsync everything other than /boot across from the 'primary' - I think that should work.
dmc@puffin. (D.M.Chapman) wibbled on Wednesday 24 March 2010 16:29
To be honest, unless you are prepare to spend an obscene amount of money on a hardware RAID device, doing RAID1 or RAID5 in software is almost certainly going to be more efficient and faster.
Not to mention that the Linux RAID MD drivers are more featureful (and robust) than even the mid range RAID units I've used in the past (eg Infotrend, Adaptec).
Hardware RAID sounds good, until you look at the internal bus bandwidth on many of those units under a couple of grand (plus disks).
Actually its a good excuse to upgrade to the latest
Last time the motherboard or disk controller went, so I had to reinstall on a spare machine - couldn't have used the same exact software cos the hardware was different.
Was more looking for something free. ;-) There's no important data on that PC - the vital stuff is on the Acorn. And with that you can just copy anything between discs. I was more thinking of avoiding the time it takes to load in the PC progs I do use if Drive C failed.
Thinking on, I the PC I'm talking about uses SATA. It's the older one in the workshop that is IDE. So this one is only about 3 years old.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.