Posts: 2,238
Threads: 136
Joined: Dec 2008
Reputation:
0
Hard Drive Problems
11-07-2010, 10:00 PM
When I woke up this morning, my 1 TB external hard drive was clicking. I'm now looking for a new external hard drive. Anyone have any recommendations?
Edit:
I'm considering getting this hard drive. Does anyone have any horror stories, or better suggestions? I'll be putting in the order this evening, so if you could respond before then, that would be great. Thanks in advance.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
Posts: 2,354
Threads: 83
Joined: Jul 2005
Reputation:
0
I'm hesitant to buy any enclosed drive boxes like that since:
1) more often than not, they use multiple drives in raid 0 (half-ing your MTTF)
2) they are not customer serviceable at all
Is the data that is going to be stored on this drive backed up anywhere? Or is this the backup drive for your computer?
If this is the backup drive for your computer, you can get cheaper and more reliable solutions by getting an enclosure and a 2 TB hard drive.
This has the added bonus of being able to swap out the hard drive if needed, and you can hook it up with esata if you have an free slot on your motherboard.
If the data on the drive is not stored anywhere else (bad Jorlem!) I would seriously consider buying a small raid box.
These can range anywhere from the low end dumb raid boxes to high end drobo boxes.
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy
Posts: 2,238
Threads: 136
Joined: Dec 2008
Reputation:
0
This is the backup drive for my computer, yeah. Though lately, I've been putting some of my games and anime files on it as well, as I've run out of room elsewhere. My C drive (internal, laptop) is only about 56 GB, and I needed the space.
I have to confess, I don't really know what raid or drobo boxes are. I think I'm going to go with your enclosure+internal HD suggestion, as as far as I can tell, that looks like the best idea. I'll make the order in a bit, in case you or anyone else has something else to say.
Thanks you.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
Posts: 2,354
Threads: 83
Joined: Jul 2005
Reputation:
0
As long as you are cool with having to re-install, re-rip the games/anime in the event of a disk failure. sounds good to me.
Quick overview of raid (also wikipedia):
Raid (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is a way of making more than one physical disk appear as a single disk. There are several different types of raid, and depending on the type, they can accomplish different goals.
For most simple setups we only have to deal with Raid 0 and Raid 1 with 2 physical disks
Raid 0 (also known as scary raid): this takes all your data, and spreads it out evenly across both disks.
Pros: this can be fast (read and write speeds are cumulative) and cheap (you don't 'loose' any data to redundancy)
Cons: if a single disk fails, your are SOL. Which means you can expect catastrophic data loss in roughly 18 months
Raid 1: take all your data, and write it on both disks.
Pros: Fault Tolerance! If one drive dies, you can replace it, and the computer never knows that anything went wrong.
Cons: expensive, you only get use half of disk space you purchased (half being used for redundancy)
With more than 2 disks, you can start to get all sorts of interesting ways to maintain fault tolerance while minimizing the amount of disk space you give up to do so.
But all of them still suffer from the same problem: they don't grow.
Say you have two 1TB drives in a raid 0, and you want to upgrade it to two 2 TB drives. There are very few raid controllers out there that can (cleanly) upgrade the size of disks you work with. And none of them will work with mismatched drives.
Almost always, it's easier to beg/borrow a second raid box, copy everything onto that.
Swap out both disks in current raid with new larger disks (losing the contents in the process).
And then copy everything back.
Which is why I've become a fan of drobo. They solve that problem.
Yes, they are more expensive (cheapest thing they offer is $350) but being able to swap drives in and out as I need more storage is a lifesaver, and their build quality is top notch.
I went through two different low end dumb raid boxes (one due to repeated raid failures, and one due to inability to cool itself) before I said screw it. Backup is supposed to remove stress from my life, not add it.
I've bought two drobos so far, one for me, one for my parents. And I haven't had a single problem with them.
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy
Posts: 2,238
Threads: 136
Joined: Dec 2008
Reputation:
0
Ok. I think I get it. I'm going to order the enclosure and hard drive you linked to in your first post.
If I were to get a drobo box and another 2 TB hard drive later, could I put the HD I'm getting now and that one into the drobo box at that point, and have it work? Or do they both have to be blank from the start?
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
Posts: 2,072
Threads: 62
Joined: May 2006
Reputation:
0
*Investigates*
Okay, that does sound pretty impressive. Though I'm finding a lot of pretty negative reviews as well as positive ones. But then I'm more likely to take the word of someone I can actually talk to.
Though I've got one question based on something I read. How much noise *does* it make? Since all my equipment is also in my bedroom, this is a fairly important concern to me.
-Morgan. Not that I can afford one now anyway, but it's something to think about.
Posts: 1,382
Threads: 33
Joined: Sep 2007
Reputation:
0
"Normal operation: 20.9dB (negligible) to 24.2 dB" with the fine print "Acoustics tests performed 1m from the front of Drobo with four 1TB Western Digital GreenPower™ drives during a file copy to Drobo. Drobo has a smart, five-speed fan governed by multiple internal temperature sensors that will normally be off or operate on its lowest setting. The fan is programmed to minimize noise, but never at the expense of disk integrity. The fan can switch to higher speeds if necessary in in hot operating environments or during strenuous usage to protect drives from overheating up to 38.1dB."
As for your question, Jorlem, It looks like you can toss new drives there at any point, but they have to be formatted before going in. So you'd want to put your first drive in there before starting to use it. And also, it looks like if you have one disk in there, you don't want to slot in a much smaller disk in as your second. Check out the Drobo Capacity Calculator. "Available for data" is how much space you'd actually have.
---
The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."
>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI
Posts: 2,238
Threads: 136
Joined: Dec 2008
Reputation:
0
So, theoretically, lets say I fill up half of my 2TB drive, then buy a Drobo box and a new 2 TB. I would put the new HD into the Drobo, transfer my files from the old HD to the new one, format the old one, then put that one in the Drobo as well, and it would reorganize everything so it would all be redundant?
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
Posts: 2,354
Threads: 83
Joined: Jul 2005
Reputation:
0
Drobos, like any other raid device will wipe any drive you insert into them.
but because they can dynamically grow the array you can pull off the same trick I did.
I had a the previously mentioned dumb raid box (prone to overheating) with two 400 Gig drives (raid 1) in it.
I bought a the bottom tier drobo + two 1 TB drives. (though I could probably have done it with just one 1 TB drive, Drobo would complain that data is not safe).
1) setup drobo with the 1TB drives
2) copy the contents of the dumb raid box onto drobo.
3) pull the both 400 gig drives out of old raid box, and slot them into drobo
4) drobo wipes the 400 gig drives, but we don't care, because the data has already been copied.
5) I now have 1.6 TB of storage that can survive a single disk failure.
6) if I need more than that, I can replace one (or both, one at a time) 400 Gig drives with larger drives.
The fans can be a little loud for a bedroom if you access data while trying to sleep (like with an automated backup program that runs at 3am or something).
But as long as the disks don't need to spin, the fans will shut off.
edit: jorlem, I don't see any problem with your plan. You could probably fill up the existing drive up 80%.
as long as you have enough room on the drobo to copy the data off your preexisting drive, you'll be golden.
The link Ankh provided should help with exact numbers.
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy
Posts: 2,238
Threads: 136
Joined: Dec 2008
Reputation:
0
Ok, cool. Thank you. The Drobo is probably a ways off though. Though depending if I can find anything decent on sale after Thanksgiving or the holidays, I might be able manage something earlier. Hmmm...
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
Posts: 1,450
Threads: 168
Joined: Oct 2003
Reputation:
2
Don't get a WD product. The Elements uses a WD Caviar Green in it, and they've disabled the functionality* that allows you to take those drives and put them in a RAID.
Posts: 1,576
Threads: 94
Joined: Oct 2002
Reputation:
0
Or you could go the NAS route. What's a NAS, its short for Network Attached Storage. Basically you take a Drobo box and add a network adapter to it, allows you to access it any time over your local network. You can go as complicated as you want with 'em, I've got one that's just a basic 3.5" Hdd enclosure to multi-bay boxes with RAID, media server, print server, bittorrent. Newegg have a number to choose from.
--Rod.H
Posts: 2,238
Threads: 136
Joined: Dec 2008
Reputation:
0
jpub Wrote:Don't get a WD product. The Elements uses a WD Caviar Green in it, and they've disabled the functionality* that allows you to take those drives and put them in a RAID. I ordered the Samsung HD that sweno linked to earlier. Looking at it now, its price has jumped up $30, so I'm glad I put in the order when I did.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
Posts: 1,450
Threads: 168
Joined: Oct 2003
Reputation:
2
Rod H Wrote:Or you could go the NAS route. What's a NAS, its short for Network Attached Storage. Basically you take a Drobo box and add a network adapter to it, allows you to access it any time over your local network. You can go as complicated as you want with 'em, I've got one that's just a basic 3.5" Hdd enclosure to multi-bay boxes with RAID, media server, print server, bittorrent. Newegg have a number to choose from.
--Rod.H
That's actually what I did. I picked up a D-link DNS-323, which is an awesome little box that does regular disks, RAID 0, RAID 1, or JBOD. I had originally planned to get some 2TB WD Caviar Greens to go into it, but then I discovered their anti-RAID shenanigans, and went with a couple Seagate 1.5TBs.
Posts: 2,238
Threads: 136
Joined: Dec 2008
Reputation:
0
My new HD and the case came in today. I've put them together, and hooked it up to my computer. Problem is, its not showing up in My Computer. It says it is installed, and it shows up in the Device Manager as a disc drive, but it isn't showing up in My Computer. Anyone have any ideas?
Edit:
Never mind, figured it out. I needed to initialize and format it through Disc Management, which it is doing now.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
|
