HDD crashed again ... sigh. Some advice please!

Nothing wrong with using external HDDs as backup - I have (touch wood) yet to have one fail, though I have had a laptop internal drive fail (my own fault largely ...)

But I always have more than one. Everything is backed up on more than one drive. If you don't want to pay for another drive, your data's not that important to you!

I managed to get a lot of otherwise unretrievable data off the drive that packed up using the Linux utility ddrescue (takes a long time though, you would need to run it in a spare computer) - if you still have the duff drive and it can still be mounted and some parts readable, I recommend it and can give advice. Do not write anything to the drive though, that will make it worse.
 
yeah got some advice. Don't by from Macro. Big stores means big boxes lots of employees and lots of sport activities where there isn't a box of balls insight here catch this oops I missed. And ill just put that in the middle of Other drivers no one will notice seriously.

When I buy my hdd I get it still wrapped in its bubble wrapping with a seal on. Been buying from one pc shop my hdd and never looked somewhere else. I got 4 to 5 years out of them without a problem. So find yourself a decent pc shop and start buying them there. It can be a pain finding one that truly are in it to look after their hardware and make sure its not knocked around before giving it to a customer.
But from places that sells everything from under one roofs I learned my lesson 20 yrs ago with the corner shops selling anything from 8 bit video games to bake beans. The hardware don't last long
 
NomNom said:
Since you didn't actually own any of the content you lost I don't see why it's such a loss. I personally stay away from Samsung drives, they seem to have a higher failure rate than any other brand. Doing a RAID or mirror or even a backup next time is probably the best course of action to. The handling of the drive probably played a role in it's early death, like The_Librarian said rather get from a Pc shop so the people know not to throw the things around.
Click to expand...

maybe you just had some bad luck in buying the samsung drives. Did you buy them all from the same place?
Never had a problem with Samsung or Wd. Seagate and Hitachi I had bad run ins with. But I still buy hitachi of Seagate if their cheap and bang for buck except if its those terrible 1Tb Baracuda drives that failed at a rate of over 70 percent.

Old pcs lying around is perfect to use for a fileserver. Had a old Via kt8 collecting dust. It can take up to 8 SATA drives plus had a PCI-e slot where I popped in a PCI-e raid controller. Although it had a build in controller its awfully slow compared to a PCI-e controller which can take up to 8 drives as well. It stayed on meaning the drives didn't had to start up or shutdown and if 1 goes I just rebuild the stripe. Works like a charm.
 
shovenose said:
maybe you just had some bad luck in buying the samsung drives. Did you buy them all from the same place?
Never had a problem with Samsung or Wd. Seagate and Hitachi I had bad run ins with. But I still buy hitachi of Seagate if their cheap and bang for buck except if its those terrible 1Tb Baracuda drives that failed at a rate of over 70 percent.
Click to expand...

I can recall many many samsung hdd's that I've had to replace from friends and family, and even some customers. So it's not just me, I once had a samsung hdd fail on me within 3months.. and I always take good care of my kit. All I'm saying if I won't touch them again if I can help it, if you have no problem with them, then good for you. :)
 
I've had a bunch of drives fail on me from each manufacturer, really is no difference if I'm honest.

Have had a bunch of externals fail generally because they go through more unnecessary movement and is usually plugged in and out often. The less start-up cycles you put your drives through, the better, thus the reason I keep my internals running 24/7 and only goes off when there is bad weather about.

Another necessity is to get hdd sentinel. Awesome software that has saved me more then once, picking up bad sectors on hard drives before you would ever know, giving you plenty of time to recover the data from your drive and return it for a swap-out
 
NomNom said:
I can recall many many samsung hdd's that I've had to replace from friends and family, and even some customers. So it's not just me, I once had a samsung hdd fail on me within 3months.. and I always take good care of my kit. All I'm saying if I won't touch them again if I can help it, if you have no problem with them, then good for you. :)
Click to expand...

My omen is Seagate. They keep on dying with me. And thats their decent ones lol
 
robdutchmonkey said:
I've had a bunch of drives fail on me from each manufacturer, really is no difference if I'm honest.

Have had a bunch of externals fail generally because they go through more unnecessary movement and is usually plugged in and out often. The less start-up cycles you put your drives through, the better, thus the reason I keep my internals running 24/7 and only goes off when there is bad weather about.

Another necessity is to get hdd sentinel. Awesome software that has saved me more then once, picking up bad sectors on hard drives before you would ever know, giving you plenty of time to recover the data from your drive and return it for a swap-out
Click to expand...
its always the case heh. They sit there nice and comfy where you look after them then they go and die. But when your wife throws you with it hit the wall they keep on going for years and years and let you know when theyre dying
 
I think I'll go with 2 drives going forward. I guess luck is on my side because the drive was accessible this morning and I got a lot of files from it, probably recovered about 90% of the items. CRC errors killed the rest!
 
Beylie said:
I think I'll go with 2 drives going forward. I guess luck is on my side because the drive was accessible this morning and I got a lot of files from it, probably recovered about 90% of the items. CRC errors killed the rest!
Click to expand...

run Spinrite on it. If Spinrite can't recover the data nothing can. Unless you got 10000grand for specialized hdd recovery.
 
Spinrite is the LAST thing you want to use on an unhealthy drive. All it does is reads each sector and writes it back. Pointless and puts big strain on the drive.
 
Last edited:
Im using a Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB USB 3 external drive and extremely happy with it.

Downloaded Microsoft Synctoy 64-bit (its free), configured a folder pair - my internal Hitachi1TB & WD Mybook external drive - and that was it.

Happy days. :)
 
got a verbatim at macro a few months back. nothing wrong so far but dreading having to lose all my stuff.
 
SecretCode said:
Exactly. Disaster. Do not allow anything to write to the drive.

Stay away from commercial software, stay away from anything Gibson.

ddrescue, I say again.
Click to expand...
and what will windows? it will trash the drive.
How much does professional data rescue goes for these days?
 
Even for things you can get again relatively easily you have to weigh your time against the cost of having a backup drive. I'd rather spend the money on the second set of drives to keep a complete duplicate of my data.

One thing to check on these all in one external drives is that it isn't the power supply that is failing. Some of my external drives make clicking noises when they're not getting enough juice.

robdutchmonkey said:
I've had a bunch of drives fail on me from each manufacturer, really is no difference if I'm honest.

Have had a bunch of externals fail generally because they go through more unnecessary movement and is usually plugged in and out often. The less start-up cycles you put your drives through, the better, thus the reason I keep my internals running 24/7 and only goes off when there is bad weather about.
Click to expand...
Just a waste of electricity as far as I'm concerned.

maldek said:
got a verbatim at macro a few months back. nothing wrong so far but dreading having to lose all my stuff.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't worry about it. They sell plenty of delicate equipment.
 
Lol what like R5 per day? I'd rather spend R5 per day keeping the pc running rather then constantly starting up and powering down 13 hard drives :)
 
shovenose said:
and what will windows? it will trash the drive.
Click to expand...
That really depends on what the problem is.

SecretCode said:
Exactly. Disaster. Do not allow anything to write to the drive.

Stay away from commercial software, stay away from anything Gibson.

ddrescue, I say again.
Click to expand...
Depends entirely on what is wrong. The commercial data recovery tools I've used will not write anything to a corrupted drive.

robdutchmonkey said:
Lol what like R5 per day? I'd rather spend R5 per day keeping the pc running rather then constantly starting up and powering down 13 hard drives :)
Click to expand...
Most people don't turn their computer off, then immediately back on, then immediately off again, then immediately back again, all day, every day. Of course unless you have old drives or you've disabled the feature they'll be powering themselves down and the OS will be as well to conserve power. If I were going to spend R1800 per year I'd rather just replace the drives every year (even though they'll last years being turn on and off).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X