Fuck hard drives.
So the 1TB drive in my desktop died, and I realized that I don't really have a backup.
But this leads me to a topic for discussion.
Are hard drives getting worse? It seems that hard drive makers are building less and less reliable hardware, and that they seem to be falling apart a lot more often. This is the fourth drive I've had die on me recently, although not in the same system. I've never had this many hard drive failures in such a short period of time, and all of the drives were manufactured around a similar time.
Anyone else notice this?
But this leads me to a topic for discussion.
Are hard drives getting worse? It seems that hard drive makers are building less and less reliable hardware, and that they seem to be falling apart a lot more often. This is the fourth drive I've had die on me recently, although not in the same system. I've never had this many hard drive failures in such a short period of time, and all of the drives were manufactured around a similar time.
Anyone else notice this?
Comments
Haven't lost a drive in around 6 years.
Ever since then, I've been pretty good about keeping backups. Could be better though. You can never have too many backups. I make sure that everything has at least two copies somewhere and I have three backup drives that are offline and powered on only when I run my weekly backup scripts.
Disc drives? Those are nasty, especially any from early 2000s...
Now the WD I bought a while back has been running straight for at least 2 years now without any problems.
*knocks on wood*
But usually I try to mix and match hard drive manufacturers. I typically go with Seagate for the main drive and WD for the backup. Although one year I did go hitatchi for the backup. That drive seems to still be doing fine.
I'm still looking into getting that failed one back online, or at least recover the data from it.
I have. I used to love Samsung drives, and now they're really Seagate.
My coworker used to love Hitachi drives, and now they're really Western Digital.
I've more or less gone full SSD for my OS drives. Every machine I use on a regular basis has an SSD for the OS. I would still go mechanical for storage though, at least for the time being. SSDs will probably take over eventually, but not right now.
Right now the only thing keeping me from going 100% solid state is the cost per gigabyte. I too have gone SSD for most of my operating system drives, with the exception of Windows drives because normally I use Windows only for gaming and again it comes down to a cost per gigabyte situation where the spindled disks are still more viable right now. (most games these days are huge...)
My coworker put a Corsair SSD into a datacenter-hosted server as the OS drive about 3 years ago, and it's still going strong. My earliest SSD was put into my router box, and has been storing MRTG graphs and RRD database files for probably close to 3 years. It's a 60GB Kingston SSD.
I've got a bunch of 128GB Samsung SSDs I keep buying whenever they're below $100. I've got them as OS drives in my laptop, desktop, and file server. I've got 2 new ones in box ready to be deployed. I've overcome most of my reliability\longevity fears, but I know it'll be a few more years before they're competing with hard drive lifespans.
Regardless, in the era of my file server (which has 3TB spindled disks in a hardware RAID 5) and cloud storage, my workstations are mostly dumb terminals and when information is lost due to OS drive failure, all I really lose is applications and configuration. I've got all my important school documents in Dropbox, most of my work stuff is in Google Drive, all of my large multimedia (music, videos, etc) on my file server along with all of my ISOs, and while I might keep some day-to-day junk in my local home folders, it's not much that would be missed if it was lost.
Little while off yet, folks.
I can't and won't fully trust cloud data. If I have something I keep on a service such as dropbox or google drive, I make sure the file is encrypted. Even if the files are claimed to be safe on there, I can't really trust it unless I have physical access to the hardware itself to make sure it is. (Insert NSA spying stuff here.)
Also on one occasion, I've had a dropbox admin remove files from my dropbox folders, claiming that they recieved a DMCA on them. Those specific files were not even marked public or contained any copywright material. It was my final project I was working on for a class.
Lastly, part of me thinks it's only a matter of time until most major ISPs start doing caps, which will likely kill any reliance on cloud data and or streaming services.
As far as ISPs and caps go, I have no doubt they will cap data usage. Some already are.
I had also had a 2TB Western Digital HDD, which crashed two months ago.
:(
I now have only my old 80GB SATA II 3.5" HDD and i have Windows 7 on it.
:shock:
Old technology was better, even if it was slower.