Damnit.. I've killed another one

[Garp]

How the hell do I manage it? I've just about killed another hard disk. I'm lucky if they last me a year and a half at most. *sigh*

Ahh well, that other place what we don't talk about has some fairly cheap. I don't download movies and porn and the like so there is no need to splash out on a 500GB hdd. I just wish I knew how I managed it. I know guys that have had the same HDD for 5 years.

Thankfully I'm a paranoid type (and used to disks dying on me) so I have a 40GB IDE drive sitting in the case which I routinely use "robocopy" to mirror my e-mails and docs onto.... and now has this windows install on it :)

[Daz]

Hey it aint paranoid, it's prudent. Gotta practise what you preach. I mirror hey parts of my system partition to another disk in the same rig every day, and then every week take a ghost image of the system partition onto an external disk. Then I boot into Gentoo and run a little tar script which does the same.

Better this than lose emails/docs/photos.

[Garp]

Hey it aint paranoid, it's prudent. Gotta practise what you preach. I mirror hey parts of my system partition to another disk in the same rig every day, and then every week take a ghost image of the system partition onto an external disk. Then I boot into Gentoo and run a little tar script which does the same.

Better this than lose emails/docs/photos.

Dear god.. theres prudence and prudence!!

Gentoo tarring and all sorts of stuff like that? I'm often considered extreme for having robocopy on a daily schedule backing up my data to a spare disk. To be honest the odds of two disks dying is rare, though I really should backup to DVD or somesuch more regularly than I do :)

[Haly]

When I was writing up my dissertation, I had it backed up on 5 different hds, webspace, emailed it to another account and had it on cd ;D
I was a bit worried about losing it :D

[Daz]

It's more business practise at home than anything else. Online backup, offline archive, just cheating a bit without proper magnetic media.

[Mark]

Might be worth checking the thermal sensors on the disks and see how hot they're running. The usual suspects (e.g. speedfan) will do the job. 45C and above I'd be thinking about cooling them. In fact, I like to keep disks below 35C these days if possible. :)

I very rarely back up. Naughty, I know, but the only disks I've lost so far were on the systems that do have backups, or I was able to get the data off before the disk died. Having said that, I did back up my main system last week on to a RAID array in the server. Only problem is the server itself isn't that well backed up.

[Garp]

Might be worth checking the thermal sensors on the disks and see how hot they're running. The usual suspects (e.g. speedfan) will do the job. 45C and above I'd be thinking about cooling them. In fact, I like to keep disks below 35C these days if possible. :)

I very rarely back up. Naughty, I know, but the only disks I've lost so far were on the systems that do have backups, or I was able to get the data off before the disk died. Having said that, I did back up my main system last week on to a RAID array in the server. Only problem is the server itself isn't that well backed up.

I tend to keep a rough eye on such stuff:

Your hard disk is a HDT722516DLA380 with firmware V43OA80A.
The average temperature for this hard disk is 37C (MIN=27C MAX=47C) and yours is 34C.

The disk gets a pretty good bill of health based on S.M.A.R.T tools, but there is no doubting whats going on. Even a killdisk and re-install and I'm seeing massive lag, data corruption and the like. I'm wondering if its not the reason my box has been a bit slow loading levels on CS:S and the like too, especially given this machine is spec'd quite nicely (x2 3800, 1gb ram, etc, swap file on seperate disk). Probably is I guess.

[Mark]

TBH, I don't think I'd ever buy another Deathstar. While I'm aware that it was the IBM versions that caused trouble, and I'm not aware of the Hitachi reliability, they have too much stigma attached for my liking.

[Burble]

All my boxes backup automagically onto my TeraStation Pro every night. I've only once lost data due to a hard drive going tits up and I'm not willing to have that happen again.

[Garp]

TBH, I don't think I'd ever buy another Deathstar. While I'm aware that it was the IBM versions that caused trouble, and I'm not aware of the Hitachi reliability, they have too much stigma attached for my liking.

Indeed.. and I'm back to Western Digital this time around :)

[Garp]

Hmm.. yep, definately dodgy hdd. AS soon as I start transferring some files from it to my IDE drive everything starts going crazily slow, unresponsive and the like in ways it doesn't usually go during file transfers. Ah well.

[Mark]

SATA drive? Do you have a spare cable?

[Garp]

SATA drive? Do you have a spare cable?

Been there, tried that. 'twas my first thought. Tried a different channel and a different controller too.
Does similar stunts in my linux box, SMART reckons its healthy, real world proves its not.

[Feek]

You have more than 1 PC?

Second Copy (http://www.centered.com/) is your friend. I use it to run scheduled backups of the important bits on each PC to seperate hard drives either on the same PC or on a different PC over the LAN.

I back up my mail software, my pictures folder, my my documents, profiles etc etc. If I lose any of the PCs, I won't be losing any important data. The backups run every few hours and I don't even notice them.

[Garp]

You have more than 1 PC?

Tiddles (my second box is a small SFF jobby, hence the name), is always running Linux of some description so I'd really need to be using SCP to transfer docs; however I'm routinely trying stuff on it and wiping and reinstalling as I try stuff, so I generally don't bother backing stuff up to it.

[Garp]

NGHHHHHHHHHHHH


New hard disk does a repeated 'click of doom' after the PC has been on for about 15 mins.

[semi-pro waster]

Wow, you really are unlucky. I don't think I've ever had a hard drive properly fail on me although I've had a couple drop out of a Raid0 array(mostly my fault as I used to lift the pc a few cm then drop it to shut up an annoying fan) but they worked fine afterwards. That said I think I'm about to have a Maxtor die on me, I keep getting a clicking noise from it every so often and the PC will crash sometimes when accessing it.

[Gilly]

I've never kept more than one copy of anything and never, touch wood, lost anything.

Never had a HDD fail on me.

[Robert]

I had a buffalo NAS box (250gb) where any favourites/documents/photos go. In my PC I have a 160g boot drive with 2*320gb drives in raid.