Hard Drive Failures?
- Thread starter Keebler Elf
- Start date
Aren't all harddrivesade by only one or two companies? You can tell who made yours by searching for LurkerJoe's post on how to tell who made your HD.
Western Digital and Seagate are the two big manufacturers who bought up many of the other companies over the years. Samsung, Hitachi, IBM, Toshiba and apparently HP are other companies in the traditional drive business (though not really sure if HP manufactures their own). With Solid State drives on the rise you're see other, traditionl memory companies (Intel for one) in the market. There are also some specialty players like Iomega
IBM is no longer in the drive business, they sold their Hard Drive business to Hitachi several years back.
Almost correct. You have to pay to ship the defective drive back to them. But they pay to ship the new one.
So I got my 2 replacement drives this week, all covered under warranty. Total cost to me was about $16 for postage to return the defective drives. And they even gave me a 1 TB caviar black replacement drive because the 750 blue wasn't available!
No complaints from me, WD made it as painless as possible.
No complaints from me, WD made it as painless as possible.
I'd freak if I lost all my pictures and videos, but burning them all onto disk is insane and costly.
Unless I use blank BluRays? Anyone have suggestions - no online storage either.
sounds like you need a RAID setup. never set one up before , but if I had as many photos and videos as it sounds like you have I'de probably do it. if any one drive fails , then you automatically have a back-up.
I'd use 2-3 HDDs for backup or a RAID setup as islandman4567 mentioned above.I'd freak if I lost all my pictures and videos, but burning them all onto disk is insane and costly.
Unless I use blank BluRays? Anyone have suggestions - no online storage either.
I DON'T trust CD or DVD media for long term storage after losing most of a CD music collection stored on CDs a few years ago! Back then some salesmen at a couple places told me CDs were perfect for storage and would last 100 years. So i believed them and created a 33 CD collection on the entire history of Rock & Roll from 1955-2000. There were over 6500 songs saved as mp3s of very good quality. Stored then as recommended but ~5 yrs later some CDs refused to open/play anymore! Today only 4 of them still open, the first 4 that were created! All the rest became corrupted somehow. Tried several recovery apps with no luck. They are lost. I saved what was possible and moved everything to extra drives for backup onto 3 drives.
What
Good quality power supplies should not "burn out".
What brand is your current power supply? There are a lot of cheap crappy power supplies out there.
Good quality power supplies should not "burn out".
What brand is your current power supply? There are a lot of cheap crappy power supplies out there.
So those are two quality PSUs. Under what circumstances did the OCZ burn out? Generally it's a power surge that kills a PSU. Lightning strike taking the power out and then the surge when the power comes back on kills electronics. You might consider a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to plug your computer into. Some of them have warrantees that guarantee to replace your stuff if it's damaged by a surge.
Long term means different things to different people. Once we start wanting things to be accessible, let's say, in 10 years, cds and dvs become uncertain. keeping the original drive (technological preservation) that you wrote them on may help. having different drives (lite-on, pioneer...) that are used by the hacker community may help. but for the normal folk, just getting extra hard drives is the easiest. a solid backup strategy that cycles all the drives every few months will keep them operational. it's a bit difficult to see when a drive is failing if we never read from it so we may end up making backups onto a failing drive without knowing.
i use sync-toy and i'm hopeful that as it scans the target backup drive to see what to update, it'll perhaps pick up bad blocks. i'm not so sure about this and need to come up with a way to test my backup drive. as i have everything important in 3 places, this isn't too serious, just a concern.
bummer...yeah, harddrives are so damn cheap these days, just buy new ones...maybe format the old ones and try usign them as slaves exclusively for downloading torrents or whatever, and run them into the ground ha!
what retailer did you buy the hard-drives from? big computer megastores such as Frys are fucking-worthless...many people who work there are morons, I've seen damaged pallet loads, crash into something and dent the corner, oh no big deal, just throw stuff on the shelves...including their dirty rotten underhanded trick of simply reshelving returns...even if I look for mint condition packaging, go home only to find driver disc missing, or a dogeared manual, or the worst a pin broken out of a memory slot! I never get anything from such places anymore...I would rather go through an online retailer or a small ma & pa shop.
later
what retailer did you buy the hard-drives from? big computer megastores such as Frys are fucking-worthless...many people who work there are morons, I've seen damaged pallet loads, crash into something and dent the corner, oh no big deal, just throw stuff on the shelves...including their dirty rotten underhanded trick of simply reshelving returns...even if I look for mint condition packaging, go home only to find driver disc missing, or a dogeared manual, or the worst a pin broken out of a memory slot! I never get anything from such places anymore...I would rather go through an online retailer or a small ma & pa shop.
later
