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Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

elkhornsun
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p.2 #1 · p.2 #1 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

ALL drives fail eventually so the smart approach is to have a backup of all your important files. Hard to believe that anyone does not know this.

At a bare minimum one should use two drives set up as a RAID1 single volume so everything on the first drive is mirrored and duplicated on the second drive. When one drive fails the data is safely stored on the second drive.

A better solution is a RAID 5 NAS box with 4 drives. Then when one drive fails you can use the 3 good drives until there is time to replace the failed drive.

You can send the drive off to a data recovery service but be prepared to spend more than $1,000 and they may not be able to recover the data.

I go by the approach of not putting something at risk if I cannot afford to lose it. So I have internal mirrored drives on my workstations and have a primary 5-drive NAS that is backed up monthly to a second 4-drive NAS.

May 28, 2023 at 04:26 PM

EB-1
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p.2 #2 · p.2 #2 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

billsamuels wrote:
I've been checking out the makings of SSD drives and what makes them attractive besides the fact that there are NO moving parts, is that what eventually fails in them isn't the entire drive, but rather the "write" function. They stop writing, but they continue to read so if you use it as a purely storage drive and once you fill it up, you can access your information and as long as you don't change the data, you won't wear the drive out. So they make excellent storage drives and they have the same lifespan as a regular drive if...Show more →

Exceeding the write wearout level is only one of the SSD failure modes. More often we see SSDs that are suddenly and completely dead or not accessible/formattable. Ideally there will be a SMART warning, but you cannot rely on that. Best practice is to assume an SSD will die at any time, just like a HDD.

EBH

May 28, 2023 at 05:22 PM

Bruce n Philly
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p.2 #3 · p.2 #3 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

EB-1 wrote:
Exceeding the write wearout level is only one of the SSD failure modes. More often we see SSDs that are suddenly and completely dead or not accessible/formattable. Ideally there will be a SMART warning, but you cannot rely on that. Best practice is to assume an SSD will die at any time, just like a HDD.

EBH

Yes, SSDs will crash and using them should have no effect on your backup strategy. Good news: I never had one fail and I have a bunch in my my main rig, and various laptops I use for work, music production, home theater, Her machine... etc. Never had one fail.

Peace
Bruce in Philly

May 29, 2023 at 09:18 AM

EB-1
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p.2 #4 · p.2 #4 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

I've had a few dead SSDs, but that was out of dozens. One was a rather expensive Intel 4TB U.2 drive a few years ago (when 4TB was a large SSD) and another was an early 1TB client SATA III.

EBH

May 29, 2023 at 11:29 PM

Alan321
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p.2 #5 · p.2 #5 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

Only one HDD failed ?! Bliss

Be aware that if you change the RAID mode of the MEPD or any switchable RAID case, then the drives already in it may be trashed immediately. So be careful.

Also be aware that any HDD/RAID configuration within a single case can all be trashed or lost simultaneously. A backup within the same case is not a safe backup. In fact, nor is a backup in any other case that is connected at the same time for making say ... backups, because whatever glitch kills one could just as easily kill two. And the source problem could be a drive, the case it is in, the power supply, the computer, etc.

A sneaky fault could trash multiple drives at the same or different times before you identify it. Therefore multiple backups are necessary for data security.

I don't think there is any type of computer component that I haven't had fail at least one time, but HDDs and SSDs are my most frequent hardware failures. That's why I have multi-generational backups at all times. i.e., backups, backups of backups, etc.

My most recent HDD failures were a pair a 8TB pro HDDs that both had performance issues and intermittent problems from day one. They were replaced under warranty but it took me months to realise they were a problem.

If you have a spare drive in your PC case then you might copy your external drive to that, then disconnect that external drive and connect the backup external drive, and then copy your internal drive onto it. Then test the final copy. That way most of your data will be available on an off-line drive at all times. And the backups should not be relied upon until they are tested and proven ok, preferably after a reboot so that all drive caches are cleared.

You also should consider using the external MEPD cases as striped RAIDs to pretty much double the operating speed when doing bulk transfers. Backups at single-drive rates are painfully slow by modern standards, especially with multi TB of data.

If you do lots of backups via an intermediary internal drive then you might want to use a dedicated 2TB or 4TB SSD to help speed things up; both copying and testing file checksums.

True data security takes a lot of work. That's why most people in the already small minority who actually bother to think about it end up ignoring it or doing a poor job of it.

May 30, 2023 at 02:33 AM

billsamuels
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p.2 #6 · p.2 #6 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

billsamuels wrote:
Hey Dan, I was wondering when you might chime in. Actually, I got one of the Sandisk portable 1TB photo drives a while ago and I back-up my SD cards when traveling to the Sandisk drive about every other day. Plus, I'm using a 5DSR which I mirror the dual drives (SD & CF) so I have two copies. The only problem is the SD cards keep getting bigger and CF cards are harder and harder to find in small sizes, so 2 CF's =1 SD.

With your RAID units, do you use traditional HD's or are you using SSD...Show more →

May 30, 2023 at 04:20 AM

Bruce n Philly
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p.2 #7 · p.2 #7 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

Wanna build a RAID array and be really paranoid?

Don't order all the drives at the same time .. purchase from different sources and stagger the timing of your orders. Huh? Why? You don't want the drives to be from the same manufacturing lots. Anything just "off" will be in all your drives.

Just being paranoid.

Peace
Bruce in Philly

May 30, 2023 at 07:10 AM

Camperjim
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p.2 #8 · p.2 #8 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

I am more paranoid than you. I won't even consider a Raid fearing some issue with the system that totally destroys some or all of the data.

May 30, 2023 at 11:27 AM

billsamuels
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p.2 #9 · p.2 #9 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

Lovely thoughts!!!

May 31, 2023 at 12:27 AM

Gregory Edge
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p.2 #10 · p.2 #10 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

I am a Mac user so my machines are all backed up using Time Machine. That is my first line of defense. Very handy for those times when you realize a day or two later you flushed a file or need to roll something back. Just pick a day and restore that file.

My personal files; documents, photos, videos, etc are all on an external drive. This is my working drive. It is large enough everything fits here with plenty of free space.

I have an external drive that backs up weekly for photos and another for videos.

I use Backblaze for last resort cloud storage. If your house burns down, you get struck by lightning or robbed you still have your files. It runs in the background and keeps things current. I have tested it a few times and actually needed it once for a file.

Just because it is included with my Amazon Prime membership I use their unlimited photo backup. Again it is automated and runs in the background.

A NAS is not really a backup solution. RAID 5 gives you the ability to survive a single failed disk. RAID 6 allows two failures.

I don't trust SSDs and only run my OS on it. They have a limited number of writes. So if you are making changes to files often, as you are photo editing, you can use kill your drive.

Jun 01, 2023 at 08:11 PM

EB-1
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p.2 #11 · p.2 #11 · Hard Drive Crashed w/"best" Pix on it

Gregory Edge wrote:
I don't trust SSDs and only run my OS on it. They have a limited number of writes. So if you are making changes to files often, as you are photo editing, you can use kill your drive.

SSDs are plenty durable enough for most systems, but of course I would not have a database getting hammered all day on a consumer drive. Decent TLC M.2 SSDs w/DRAM are rated about 600 writes. Assuming a 5-year warranty on the better parts that works out to 0.33 DWPD. Are you expecting to write more than that? Some are double that and you can get U.2 or U.3 in the ~1 DWPD or higher range. Of course it's often easier to simply buy larger SSDs to get more usable life.

FWIW, I have 3.5 YO boot SSD (OS/programs only) that is still at 99% life. It is on every day and I restore the image every week at least. My data SSDs actually get far more usage. Some with only 2000 hours are down to 98% because I push a few TB every few days back and forth. OTOH, I have one 4TB SSD with 21,275 hours and it is at 99%. By comparison an enterprise hard drive (practically regardless of capacity) is rated for 550TB/year so 2750TB over the 5-year life. That's almost the same as a 4TB SSD with 2400TB lifetime writes. And consumer or NAS hard drives are often rated for only 300 or 180TB/year. SSDs don't look so bad then.

EBH

Jun 02, 2023 at 01:17 AM

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