A better truth is to use 2 dissimilar drives. If you use 2 identical drives, and there is a design or manufacturing flaw, then the odds significantly increase that both will fail at about the same time.Originally Posted by patrickjames
A better truth is to use 2 dissimilar drives. If you use 2 identical drives, and there is a design or manufacturing flaw, then the odds significantly increase that both will fail at about the same time.
I can confirm that LaCie drives fail quicker than other brands I've owned. Their case designs are pretty though. Although perhaps having Phillipe Starke design computer hardware led to some compromises with regards to cooling? And paying for a leading Eurotrash designer means they had to go cheaper on the components to hit their price point?
I've had pretty good success with WD external drives, but I don't work them very hard nor do I need terabytes upon terabytes of storage space. I especially like the low cost and how that allow me to back up my back up for less than the price of a mroe expensive drive.
I personally don’t recommend the Lacie drives, its not the hard drives themselves but the case and power supply that are the real problem.
I had a client that lost 3 of them within a year or 2 of buying them. The design is pretty but the heat they generate is definitely an issue.
Its worse with the BigDisk, they’re crammed together with little air circulation.
For some reason i bought a 1tb BigDisk to transfer files from a client, it was so hot after 20 minutes that i couldn’t touch it.
I bet i could have fried an egg on it or a least burn my finger prints off. Its now sitting in a closet unused.
I remember at one point that Lacie was offering drive restoration services for the BgDisk as part of the purchase price in the event of a malfunction.
I don’t know if they are still doing it but that tells you something about their faith in their own enclosures. I know a few people that had to use it within the first year.
Heat can kill a drive, not as fast as dropping or banging it but its not good for them or the components around them.
My 8 bay raid 5 array has over 10 fans just dedicated to the drives, they wouldn’t put them there if they didn’t need to be cooled.
Still the whole array is at 98-110F and the total combined fan speed is around 41k RPM (the little LCD told me).
WD drives are good but SeaGate drives are probably the best i have used. Ive never had a problem with them but they’re a bit more expensive then WD.
If youre going the raid route (best way!), buying drives from different manufacturing lots is a safer way to go. Especially with mirroring and stripping.
Ive been burned by a bad drive lot before and its not fun at all. I would also be careful with firewire and USB attached drives not that they’re bad.
If you don’t wait for them to fully detach from the OS after you eject the drive, you can damage the drives catalog tree or worse the data blocks.
When the catalog tree is damaged, usually it can be restored using software that can search for and rebuild the tree. Some data might be lost but youre not totally SOL.
Ive never had good luck with that route, the time alone for it to search the whole drive can be measured in days and its still a hit or miss.
Professional data recovery is very expensive and deep diving recovery for 1tb is a grand or more but worth every penny if you need it.
The only thing i can say to that is backup, backup and if youre in doubt backup again! You can never have to many good backups.
Also remember to test your restoration strategy often. Nothing worse then thinking you can restore your data only to find out that its corrupted or the drive is dead.
Ian, I agree with just about everything you said.
<rant>I would add one thing that's a pet peeve of mine. I remember being at a macWorld Expo and buying a Granite Digital case, a "Bay-Cooler". When I got home I plugged it in and put my hand in front of the fan. It was rotating at around 5 RPM (I'm exaggerating for effect) and putting out hardly any air at all. I also had a conversation with FirmTek who made the first direct-connect (no cables) external SATA case way back when. Cooked a few drives in that case. I finally hooked up back to back external fans to that case.
Why can't any of these manufacturers put some decent fans in their cases? They all talk about their thermal designs, but as far as I can tell, they all stink. Fans aren't expensive, there are good quiet ones, just overpower the damn thing so you have plenty, what's the deal!!!?
</rant>
So Ian, I was going to get another Sonnet case. You like any specific one for cooling?
Lenny
EigerStudios
Museum Quality Drum Scanning and Printing
With Mac's that is true. Originally it was the case with Windows too, but now it is safe to just unplug because Windows devices no longer hold data in the buffer more than a few seconds.
Peter Krogh has written an excellent book which covers digital workflow in quite a lot of detail. It's called the DAM Book, and there is a very good forum there as well.
The points he stresses are redundancy and consistency in workflow. Whatever you choose to do, and however you configure your drives think about how you backup and archive (two different terms) your data. I personally agree that RAID with some sort of mirroring (I use RAID 5 in an Otherworld Computing Q2 enclosure) is essential.
There is a site - http://www.storagereview.com/ - which has a user-contributed reliability databse as well as some good drive reviews.
If you are going to build a RAID array then get real hard drives. The consumer ones are built to a very competitive price point.
For instance a Carviar Black 1 Terra, I use em', is about $90 these days. A 1 Terra RE3 is nearly $200. A much better drive.
drive is drive... u need to back up your data anyway... doesnt matter its RAID 5, RAID 6 or RAID 1000... you need second backup or triple backups.... you will need it, trust me.
I have negatives. Everything else is derivative and really does not matter much. My time mostly is at stake. So backups for me are really not needed at all.
I have some 70 Gig of cartoons, now they were collected over many years and are hard to replace. I keep them on two separate drives.
My games are all from Steam now so i can blow everything to ... hades and get em' back whenever I want.
Because of these facts I use cheap drives. If I had digital files I could not replace or if I was doing professional work I would use good drives. The enterprise level drives are much less likely to fail. No matter you scheme good drives are essential for important stuff.
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