Comments on: AAAARGH http://www.housepetscomic.com/2010/01/05/aaaargh/ <> Sat, 31 Jul 2010 05:40:35 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: tahrey http://www.housepetscomic.com/2010/01/05/aaaargh/comment-page-1/#comment-18450 tahrey Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:27:25 +0000 http://www.housepetscomic.com/2010/01/05/aaaargh/#comment-18450 Yeah... was it a Seagate (aka Maxtor, too) or Western Digital? Seen a LOT of faults with those of late - though my stolen ones were a Max (...an RMA replacement for a DOA itself) and a WD Mybook (which never quite worked right, on the interface side although the physical bits seemed solid). They're a year-old vintage though, the quality drop seems to be in the last few months. I'd throw my lot in with Fujitsu (made my laptop HD, had a lot of abuse), Hitachi (ex IBM, generally good after the 75GXP blip) or Samsung right now. The latter having made the core drives in my two new Iomegas... Yeah… was it a Seagate (aka Maxtor, too) or Western Digital? Seen a LOT of faults with those of late – though my stolen ones were a Max (…an RMA replacement for a DOA itself) and a WD Mybook (which never quite worked right, on the interface side although the physical bits seemed solid). They’re a year-old vintage though, the quality drop seems to be in the last few months.

I’d throw my lot in with Fujitsu (made my laptop HD, had a lot of abuse), Hitachi (ex IBM, generally good after the 75GXP blip) or Samsung right now. The latter having made the core drives in my two new Iomegas…

]]> By: tahrey http://www.housepetscomic.com/2010/01/05/aaaargh/comment-page-1/#comment-18449 tahrey Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:24:03 +0000 http://www.housepetscomic.com/2010/01/05/aaaargh/#comment-18449 BTW, stay the frick away from tape based archiving unless you're a business running daily/weekly incrementals with quite a few tapes and at least a couple of drives - they're not exactly failure proof themselves, expensive in small amounts, and can suffer a Zipdrive-like "click of death" phenomenon where a fault on one tape affects the mechanism, that then knocks out the other tapes you try to use with it (better if one breaks to immediately retire both the tape and drive for further testing and failover to the other drive(s) and tapes) Yeah, I had that happen. Right after I was upgrading a PC and someone bumped me, sending the (3.2Gb omg it was massive at the time!) hard disk spiralling 4-5ft onto the deck. Got some of the stuff off onto Zips (it was an oldskool Seagate after all) but it eventually breathed its last. Went to restore the latest backup ............ snarl! goes the tape, having got condensation on it somehow ..... and so does the carefully-dried secondary one, because the drive transport got mullered. Whoops. When did you last see an optical drive do that? All you really need to do with them is keep them in moderate temperature and humidity, and AS DARK AS POSSIBLE :D The ones left out in the sun die sooooo fast, to the extent that if you have one sitting offset on top of another for a couple of weeks you can see an "elbow" on the error rate chart when the read head gets to the exposed bit. Businesses use tapes for convenience, reasonable security, speed and the way that they become a lot cheaper when you're doing mahoosive backups on a very regular basis... BTW, stay the frick away from tape based archiving unless you’re a business running daily/weekly incrementals with quite a few tapes and at least a couple of drives – they’re not exactly failure proof themselves, expensive in small amounts, and can suffer a Zipdrive-like “click of death” phenomenon where a fault on one tape affects the mechanism, that then knocks out the other tapes you try to use with it (better if one breaks to immediately retire both the tape and drive for further testing and failover to the other drive(s) and tapes)

Yeah, I had that happen. Right after I was upgrading a PC and someone bumped me, sending the (3.2Gb omg it was massive at the time!) hard disk spiralling 4-5ft onto the deck. Got some of the stuff off onto Zips (it was an oldskool Seagate after all) but it eventually breathed its last. Went to restore the latest backup ………… snarl! goes the tape, having got condensation on it somehow ….. and so does the carefully-dried secondary one, because the drive transport got mullered. Whoops. When did you last see an optical drive do that? All you really need to do with them is keep them in moderate temperature and humidity, and AS DARK AS POSSIBLE :D The ones left out in the sun die sooooo fast, to the extent that if you have one sitting offset on top of another for a couple of weeks you can see an “elbow” on the error rate chart when the read head gets to the exposed bit.

Businesses use tapes for convenience, reasonable security, speed and the way that they become a lot cheaper when you’re doing mahoosive backups on a very regular basis…

]]> By: tahrey http://www.housepetscomic.com/2010/01/05/aaaargh/comment-page-1/#comment-18446 tahrey Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:06:56 +0000 http://www.housepetscomic.com/2010/01/05/aaaargh/#comment-18446 TW: You need a decent SSD and controller as well to get any proper benefit. My attempt to replace an old laptop's 800mb drive with a 2Gb compact flash resulted in slow, slow performance, and then failure when too many writes burnt it out. "Modern" ones are allegedly far better, but this was within the last 5 years, so hmmm... But the 800mb is still ticking, along with the many other ancient low-capacity drives that clutter up my dusty cupboards and occasionally get pulled out for nostalgia's sake. However if your controller goes, don't you just need to replace it with another one of the same type (or sub the flash chips into a donor device with the same)? It doesn't have any memory of its own does it? I had been assured - e.g. by comparitive destruction tests on TV and the web - that flash was better for data security than spinning disks because of this. Replacing the electronics or transplanting the platters on a hard disk is a fool's errand because of how closely tuned the circuits are to the data patterning (or the other way round to be pedantic, as one causes the other) and the unlikelihood of your having access to a cleanroom. But flash is a creature of pure data... same as swapping RAM between PCs - so long as the specs match, you're golden. TW: You need a decent SSD and controller as well to get any proper benefit. My attempt to replace an old laptop’s 800mb drive with a 2Gb compact flash resulted in slow, slow performance, and then failure when too many writes burnt it out. “Modern” ones are allegedly far better, but this was within the last 5 years, so hmmm… But the 800mb is still ticking, along with the many other ancient low-capacity drives that clutter up my dusty cupboards and occasionally get pulled out for nostalgia’s sake.

However if your controller goes, don’t you just need to replace it with another one of the same type (or sub the flash chips into a donor device with the same)? It doesn’t have any memory of its own does it? I had been assured – e.g. by comparitive destruction tests on TV and the web – that flash was better for data security than spinning disks because of this. Replacing the electronics or transplanting the platters on a hard disk is a fool’s errand because of how closely tuned the circuits are to the data patterning (or the other way round to be pedantic, as one causes the other) and the unlikelihood of your having access to a cleanroom. But flash is a creature of pure data… same as swapping RAM between PCs – so long as the specs match, you’re golden.

]]> By: Tapewolf http://www.housepetscomic.com/2010/01/05/aaaargh/comment-page-1/#comment-18317 Tapewolf Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:19:18 +0000 http://www.housepetscomic.com/2010/01/05/aaaargh/#comment-18317 So buy a couple of others and mirror it to them. I have a backup process where I dump the main computer disks onto a terabyte external disk once a month. I have two of these, I keep one at home and the other in my desk at work and swap them over each month so they are never all in the same place at once. So buy a couple of others and mirror it to them. I have a backup process where I dump the main computer disks onto a terabyte external disk once a month. I have two of these, I keep one at home and the other in my desk at work and swap them over each month so they are never all in the same place at once.

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