In the past couple of weeks, my colleagues and myself experienced random deaths of Seagate Baracuda 7200 ES (Enteprise Series) hard drives. These were not “Bricks”, as people like to call recent issues with Seagate Barracudas 7200.11 – but rather almost three year old hard drives that happily worked in RAID5 arrays. In one case, two died on a five-drive RAID5 array. As you can guessed, only luck (or head) saved the data as all the critical data was also backed up on external 400GB drive. But still, backing up 1.25TB on 400GB hard drive is obviously – missing a lot of data. In another, single drive (again, Seagate Barracuda) failed containing hours of RED4K video died out. That drive was actually our backup and was not switched on all-the-time.
Couple of years ago, I believed in WD’s Marketing moto “Put Your Life On It!” and purchased WD’s external hard drive box, containing “A grade” hard drive. That drive contained all of my pictures in period between 2002-2005 and needless to say, it wasn’t going anywhere but stayed on my desk. One day, this drive simply stopped working. I took it to a data recovery company and was told that the drive has manufacturers fault and that the head scratched the drive to that level that the data could not be recovered. Needless to say, I started to back up things on DVDs and even on Blu-ray media.
Today’s announcement of Western Digital’s 2TB Green drive brings sheer joy at the amount of data you can put in a five drive RAID5 array. Bear in mind that almost every motherboard sold in the past couple of years can fit at least four of these monsters, so you can have 8TB of data on your personal computer.
Then again, backing up 8TB of data is nothing short of logistical nightmare, since Blu-ray offers only 25 or 50GB of data and will charge you an arm and a leg for a single writable medium. It pays more to buy another hard drive for backup than buying a deck of five or ten writable BD-R media. Our video production studio is producing enormous amount of content with every filming, and while we keep the edited stuff, keeping unedited footage is almost impossible due to large foot print. In that way, while we are ready for investing in 2TB drives, bear in mind that every owner should be careful if the unthinkable happens and the hard drive goes poof.
My personal advice to every owner of hard drive goes as follow: backup your most important stuff on three locations. Prioritize the importance of data. Given the size of sensitive data, sometimes, a 1GB USB stick can be more useful than a BD or tape drive.
- First tier should be your most important data – backup this online as well
- Second tier should be data such as private pictures, videos etc- for that, you can use optical media or another hard drive.
- Third tier should be something you can live without.
All in all, Google’s Gdrive cannot come soon enough. 2TB hard drive is available for 300 bucks. Excellent for your movie collection, but for anything sensitive, go with RAID5 and five drives.
Go get enough of those drives.. and build a RAID-6+0…
It’ll cost you an arm and a leg, though!
By: Thorsten Wolf on January 27, 2009
at 17:25
Can I tell you that I am just not a believe in RAID 5 anymore after I had a horrible experience with an Intel NAS this past year:
http://www.edbordenblog.com/2008/04/intel-nas-raid-malfunction-kill-me-now.html
My thought after I went through all of that was introducing the potential for a logical/controller/software error into the equation is too big of a risk. Better to use a RAID 1 so that the drives are simple mirrors. Yes, you lose efficiency of storage space, but drives are big enough now that you can probably fit what you need on 2-4TB easily, which can be done on 4 drives these days. Unless you need massive, massive storage for video editing, etc, I will never recommend RAID 5.
By: Ed Borden on January 27, 2009
at 19:50
Well… everything can happen – I also lost two drives in RAID5 array and went bust.
But, it is important to backup your most important things. for that, I use USB sticks and optical media.
Most important stuff is on a USB key (password protected), single DVD and two mirrors on hard drives.
That’s the important bit. Photos and all… I’ve found that it pays to have analog copies of things such as pictures of babies, family and all… but yeah, data loss is always somewhere around.
By: theovalich on January 28, 2009
at 15:31
Huh, this article reminds me of my data losses a few years ago, first time it was IBM 40 GB disk that contained tons of my digital photos, documents and saved games from my favorite games (back then this was priceless to me), the second time Windows itself deleted all of my data on E: drive, leaving nothing but the whole directory structure intact (think I was using that clean up drive embedded utility that comes with Windows).
Also once I accidentally formatted my E drive instead of my C while I was installing WinXP – luckily I returned everything…
The most recent accident with hard drives happened last summer – I had Lacie 320 GB external drive mainly used for backing up data from my computers. This one was always disconnected from the power source and was used like once a month for backup purposes. When I returned from my holidays, Windows no longer were detecting the drive and since it was bought abroad, my only choice was to open the external case and see if the disk itself is OK. Luckily, the problem was in the electronics of the ext. case and the disk was completely fine and kept all the data…
Oh, yes, now I remember another data loss, but, I’ll leave this one for another time
By: Darco on January 29, 2009
at 14:28
Well, true… my data loss stories are here and there, but one thing I learned was that regardless of how secure you think you are, something may go wrong.
RAID5 with five drives should have bought peace, two drives went poof. So, not exactly a happy camper here.
But it happens…
By: theovalich on January 29, 2009
at 15:44