God Damn It. Thats Another Hdd Blown


stay away from WD drives as they seem to be the worst drives ive seen , ive got a 200gb hdd totally non oprational now and it was less than a year old when failure

as for bad blocks/disk sectors run scandisk to attempt to mark them so there never used again , normaly that procedure with wd is futile so dont waste ya time :D

there is a trick where you put the hdd into a fridge to cool it down a lot then put it into the pc and it will function again for like 5-10 mins if your lucky but thats only a extream last resort so dont go freezing ya hdd's for small things like bad blocks :p

edit: allso enable S.M.A.R.T in the bios to help predict hdd failure before it happens

Steve
hope you understand some of that ;-)
 
Another way of keeping a good backup is to have a large external hard drive, a USB2 or Firewire drive will do. Then use Xcopy commands within a batch file to back up your data, you can do it incrimental so it doesn't do everything, only new or updated files get copied. You can use XPs scheduler to launch the batch file automatically.

I use this on my server, once an hour my server backs itself up to an external drive. Once a week (or more if I feel like it), I back the external drive to another machine!

If you go down this road and want help in setting up the batch file, gimme a shout! It really is a good solution and works very well!!!!
 
WarmFluffyUK posted on Aug 4 2005 at 05:38 AM said:
Another way of keeping a good backup is to have a large external hard drive, a USB2 or Firewire drive will do. Then use Xcopy commands within a batch file to back up your data, you can do it incrimental so it doesn't do everything, only new or updated files get copied. You can use XPs scheduler to launch the batch file automatically.

I use this on my server, once an hour my server backs itself up to an external drive. Once a week (or more if I feel like it), I back the external drive to another machine!

If you go down this road and want help in setting up the batch file, gimme a shout! It really is a good solution and works very well!!!!

As a 20 odd year IT Operations and System Management veteran I am going to ask you this Fluffy?

Have you got an off site copy. ie What happens if the office burns down?

I've heard so many horror stories of companies going under because all their backups were fried in a fire.
 
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BaDToaD posted on Aug 4 2005 at 08:39 AM said:
WarmFluffyUK posted on Aug 4 2005 at 05:38 AM said:
Another way of keeping a good backup is to have a large external hard drive, a USB2 or Firewire drive will do. Then use Xcopy commands within a batch file to back up your data, you can do it incrimental so it doesn't do everything, only new or updated files get copied. You can use XPs scheduler to launch the batch file automatically.

I use this on my server, once an hour my server backs itself up to an external drive. Once a week (or more if I feel like it), I back the external drive to another machine!

If you go down this road and want help in setting up the batch file, gimme a shout! It really is a good solution and works very well!!!!

As a 20 odd year IT Operations and System Management veteran I am going to ask you this Fluffy?

Have you got an off site copy. ie What happens if the office burns down?

I've heard so many horror stories of companies going under because all their backups were fried in a fire.
hehe time to get call iron mountain.
 
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BaDToaD posted on Aug 4 2005 at 09:39 AM said:
WarmFluffyUK posted on Aug 4 2005 at 05:38 AM said:
Another way of keeping a good backup is to have a large external hard drive, a USB2 or Firewire drive will do. Then use Xcopy commands within a batch file to back up your data, you can do it incrimental so it doesn't do everything, only new or updated files get copied. You can use XPs scheduler to launch the batch file automatically.

I use this on my server, once an hour my server backs itself up to an external drive. Once a week (or more if I feel like it), I back the external drive to another machine!

If you go down this road and want help in setting up the batch file, gimme a shout! It really is a good solution and works very well!!!!

As a 20 odd year IT Operations and System Management veteran I am going to ask you this Fluffy?

Have you got an off site copy. ie What happens if the office burns down?

I've heard so many horror stories of companies going under because all their backups were fried in a fire.

I have two hard drives that I rotate between Home and Uni. One is always at the Uni and the other at home.

Edit:
Actually now my boyfriend has moved here, I'm gonna keep the copy at his place from now on.
 
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that's why you don't buy HDs as large as those. hard drives nowadays have to rely on spare sectors to offer enough data security, the density provides enough risk already, even at much smaller sizes than 200GB.
 
i allways used ibm a few years ago ebfore they came crap, now i use seagate, never had a single drive dieing and the pc's run 24/7. its realy important to cool your drive, stick a fan in fornt of it, without cooling many drives get to 40-50°, but it shouldnt get over ~35. so make sure to cool them good enugh or you reduce lifetime dramaticaly!
 
Vimacs posted on Aug 6 2005 at 03:49 AM said:
i allways used ibm a few years ago ebfore they came crap, now i use seagate, never had a single drive dieing and the pc's run 24/7. its realy important to cool your drive, stick a fan in fornt of it, without cooling many drives get to 40-50°, but it shouldnt get over ~35. so make sure to cool them good enugh or you reduce lifetime dramaticaly!

Funny you should say seagate, a few years back seagate had the biggest disaster ever. All their 10 and 20 GB drives were doomed to failure when the chip the firmware was on had a timebomb style fault. i.e. after so many hours useage, the firmware became corrupt. We had hundreds of machines with these drives in and they all started to fail at the same time. I cannot imagine how much this must have cost seagate, and other suppliers of the drives, but I know we at the Uni had such an annoying time replacing them all. Even now, years later I'm still coming across the odd drive in machines that people haven't used as much as in our terminal rooms.

Don't worry though, this only effected certain model 10GB and 20GB drives. If you do happen to have a 10GB or 20GB seagate drive, then I would be a bit worried.

Edit:

On cooling, as long as you have a good airflow through your system, from the front to the back then cooling shouldn't be a problem. Also a good case with lots of space is good too. Smaller cases with less space can cause heat spots that never get airflow and stay hot. Also, be neat with your cables, cable tie them neatly within the system. Having a bunch of IDE cables sprawled inside the case will restrict the airflow.

I always think that having one fan running really fast on the back of the case is not as good as two fans running at half the speed, one at the back, and one af the front of the case. The one at the front sucks air in, while the one at the back blows it out. Kind of obvious really..
 
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I currently have 2 maxtor maxlines, a western digital caviar, a seldom used deathstar and a samsung spinpoint in the post. I back up almost everything to DVDs with verification out of paranoia. I'd ideally like to make a raid 5 in the future but I know even with that i'd backup like hell.
 
To put it simply, RAID was originally designed so you can plug a load of hard drives together in one box, usually SCSI. To the system the raid appears as one drive. A raid box will employ technology that spreads the data across the hard drives. The big advantage of this is that if one of the drives happen to fail, then the data can be reconstructed as all the data is present somewhere on the rest of the drives.

RAID now has 2 more modes. You can stripe the drives together so you can have one mega huge drive. You can Mirror (usually 2 drives) which means whatever is written to the raid system is written to both drives.

Some motherboards employ raid on special IDE ports. But the original raid systems were external SCSI boxes.

And that, is RAID put in it's simplest desctiprion!

Hope that made sense :)

Edit:
RAID actually stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks
 
Vimacs posted on Aug 6 2005 at 02:49 AM said:
i allways used ibm a few years ago ebfore they came crap, now i use seagate, never had a single drive dieing and the pc's run 24/7. its realy important to cool your drive, stick a fan in fornt of it, without cooling many drives get to 40-50°, but it shouldnt get over ~35. so make sure to cool them good enugh or you reduce lifetime dramaticaly!
got them in caddys with 2 fans, they sit about 35/36c
 
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sam fisher posted on Aug 8 2005 at 09:29 AM said:
yep much easier to digest than the wiki one :p what exactly is RAID 5 as it siad that is most popular or something.
striping with distributed parity, popular as it get you resilience with the least amount of wastage, crappy for performance though compared to other levels of RAID. hope this helps
 
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