   
|
||
 December 1, 2005 The Hard Truth About Hard DrivesBack in the early ‘80s when I started working with computers, a 10-megabyte hard drive was considered huge, and a 20-megabyte drive was enormous. I remember the day we got an IBM PC AT in the office -- it had two 20-megabyte drives. We were the envy of all -- people came from other businesses just to see it. Back then, 40 megs was serious storage capacity for a desktop computer -- and expensive. There was one big problem, though: low reliability. Those early drives were fragile -- delicate, in fact -- and if you slammed your desk drawer while your PC was running, there was a good chance that the drive would crash and your data would be lost. As a result, computer guys like me learned to do backups, basically making a copy of the data to different physical media. I witnessed a few dozen hard drives fail in just my first couple of years on the job, but luckily we usually had daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly backups that we could go back to and use for rebuilding computers. Making backups became our religion. Since then, the scope of computing has grown exponentially, and 20-megabyte hard drives are antiques. Today’s drives are measured in gigabytes (1000 megabytes), and sometimes terabytes (1000 gigabytes), a quantum leap over what we had in the past. They’re also a fraction of the price of those old 20-meg drives. For example, I just bought what I believe to be a good-quality portable 300-gigabyte drive for about $250. Big storage has become dirt cheap -- thankfully. We need it. With the rise of digital music, photography, and video, which require tremendous amounts of storage space, people are using large hard drives to store their personal treasures. Hard drives are bigger and cheaper today, and they are more durable, too. However, they’re still hardly rugged, and can crash with only a moderate amount of abuse. And when a hard drive fails, there’s a good chance that everything on it will be gone in the blink of an eye. I remember talking to a woman some time ago who used an external hard drive to store her digital photos -- thousands of them that were very important to her. She hadn’t printed any of them -- she didn't think she needed to. One day, though, her husband made a huge error by mistaking one drive for another and formatted her photo drive, erasing everything on it. She lost countless photographic memories, and her husband still hasn’t heard the end of it. I almost suffered a similar fate just the other day, which is one reason I’m writing this article -- to warn others of the perils of hard-drive storage and relying on a single device to store your media. A few months ago, I bought an external disk drive to store photos, video, and music. It worked fine for a time, but then one day the computer just wouldn’t "see it" any longer. In computer jargon, it wouldn’t "mount," and when something won’t "mount," you can’t use it. It’s basically gone, along with all the data on it -- unless you're technically savvy and can do something about it, as I was able to do. I got lucky, but I’m never running this risk again. Using Google, it took about five minutes to find out that I wasn’t alone with this problem; dozens of people had suffered the same fate with this exact same drive, and there appears to be no real solution, at least that the company will admit to. Aghast at the quick failure and the number of other users who had encountered trouble, I decided to do some further research to learn just how reliable these big, inexpensive hard drives are. In short, they’re not very reliable at all. First, I talked to the head of the tech department of the company whose hard drive failed on me. He said that my problem was "not uncommon" and that about 2% of their drives experienced failure within their warranty period. Two percent doesn’t seem like much if you think of it as two out of 100, but what about 200 out of 10,000? Suddenly, that sounds substantial -- and it appears that I was in that 2%. Also, remember that this is the failure rate that the company admits to. Would it surprise you if the failure rate was higher? So I went to another source of information, this time a data recovery specialist, a guy who makes a healthy living recovering data from unhealthy hard drives. He wants $400 to show up at your door, and doesn’t care if your drive is worth half that. For $400, he’ll likely be able to rescue some of your data, providing the drive’s not completely fried. And no matter if you get data back or not, that $400 isn’t refundable. Recovery of data will probably be more. He was quick to point out, "These drives come with a one-year warranty, but you’ll be lucky if it lasts even that long. They’re built cheap, because that’s what customers want, something cheap. But because they’re cheap, they just don’t last." "They just don’t last." Those words rattled around in my head for hours after our conversation. Owning something that just doesn’t last is about the last thing you want when it comes to storing your valuable media, which you do want to last. It goes without saying that if you’ve created a photography, music, or video collection on your hard drive, you want to keep it for years, not months. Who cares how many songs you can stick on a drive if they’ll be gone faster than they got there? You need reliability. Unfortunately, reliability is hard to come by. I couldn’t find any drives that are guaranteed to work, for, say, ten years or longer. Most computer products these days have a paltry one-year warranty, which only emphasizes that they’re likely not to last very long. And even within that one year warranty, if a drive fails, your lost data isn’t covered. All this makes backups more important. They can be what save you from the tremendous grief that the woman who lost her photographs experienced, and what I would have experienced if the technical person at the drive company wouldn’t have explained how I could completely disassemble my external hard drive, pull out the actual drive mechanism itself, and then install it in my office computer so that the computer could "see it" again. Company policy, it seems, is to just send back the drive and have it repaired or replaced with no concern for your data. Luckily, the person I talked to was helpful -- one of the good guys. But that doesn’t make backups any less important. The problem is, though, is how to do backups today. Hard drives have enormous storage capacity; it would take, for instance, about 150 CDs to back up all the data I almost lost. Plain and simple, CDs, with far less than one gigabyte of storage capacity, are no match for the size of today’s hard drives. DVDs are better, but not by much, making them impractical to use, too. And while there are the old tried-and-true tape backup systems that I used to use when I was in the computer biz -- they’re still around, greatly improved, too -- they can be fairly costly to implement properly, and the complexity of using them can be prohibitive for novices. Besides, the data-recovery expert told me that full recovery from tape-type backup is rarely 100%. There are other methods, one of which surprised me: more hard drives! Believe it or not, having more error-prone hard drives might be the most inexpensive way to back up your precious data, particularly if you have a lot of it. Despite the fact that the data-recovery expert I mentioned is able to go to great lengths to recover data from bad drives, he knows the impact of losing data himself and simply assumes that sooner rather than later his own drives will fail. So he plans ahead, before his drives fail. He takes precautions by buying new drives at least once a year, regardless of whether he’s had a drive failure or not, duplicates the data on that new drive, and tucks the old drive away in a safe place. He also keeps other drives on hand to do more frequent backups in case of a crash between his yearly drive-swaps. Drives on site, drives off site, and multiple copies of his data everywhere -- redundancy -- are what help keep him safe. Expensive? Yes, but today’s high-capacity, low-priced drives, despite their failure rates, seem to be one of the most cost-effective ways to backup data. Completely reliable? Not really -- those drives could fail, too, although all of them failing at the same time would be rare unless it was the result of something like a flood or fire. I’d rather be safe than sorry, so this is the kind of system I'm implementing now. The 300-gigabyte external hard drive I mentioned earlier is being shipped to me so that I can back up my existing data. After that, I’ll tuck that older data drive away, off-site, in case of disaster here, and I’ll work from the new 300-gig unit. I’ve already dug out another external hard drive that I had lying around, and I plan to make yet another copy of my data because, as I learned many years ago, you can never have too many copies of your data. Nothing’s worse than digging out a backup and finding out that it just doesn’t work, leaving you in as bad a predicament as if you had no backup at all. After that, I’m going to buy yet another, perhaps bigger, external hard drive and copy what’s on the 300-gigabyte drive to that and then keep that drive for redundancy. I figure that 500-gig drives will be commonplace by then, Overkill? I don’t think so. My photos, music, and videos are very important to me -- most can’t be recovered if they are lost. So, while using all these drives might seem expensive to some, consider the cost of losing your entire photo, music, or video collection. Using hard drives might be a new trend for storing audio, music, and photography, but having them fail is nothing new at all. Don’t rely on a single hard drive for storing valuable data, and back up your data now -- somehow, some way, and with as many copies as possible -- and keep it all someplace safe. You won’t regret it when -- not if --something goes wrong. ...Doug Schneider
|
||
|
