Just had a another WD die on me... four months of pics, videos, docs, artwork, client files, email and all my music down the sh*tter (as I never backed my Music up very often). Lesson learned...
...again. ::) :disappointed:
I've ran Maxtors, WDs, Seagates and Samsungs and, tbh, they all die eventually, right?
What's currently the best offering in SATA flavour for a HDD? SATA 1 I think it is - are drives backwards compatible?
I suppose 1TB will do, 7200 speed.
I also want to get an external one for regular, weekly backups (I really, really will this time!). I've always used LaCies.
Any recs from the floor? :)
Sorry nothing to suggest hard drive wise, but you might want to consider running a raid setup and/or running daily or live backups to another drive.
RAID will at least help if a single drive dies, but not if the whole thing fries..
I've currently got a batch file that runs a differential backup from my laptop to my server on a daily basis using sync toy, of if you use acronis you could do a "live" backup.
Ok, cheers.
For what it's worth, here were the symptoms:
C:\ and D:\ (Data) drives working fine yesterday. Put her to sleep overnight.
I return today and it takes about 20 mins to wake up. Windows eventually boots fine and D:\ is recognised and accessible for about 10 minutes. I grabed some data off it but then it just disappeared from Windows Explorer...
Rebooted again and bootup took 45 minutes... no sign of D:\
No audible clicking so is it the board? Worth a try replacing it (somehow)?
:worried:
Re backups - always preferred external bacause if I ever have to f**k-off quick (house fire etc) I can just grab the drive and go... ;) :panic:
I'm no expert with this to be honest, but I think usually if the board goes, you get nothing rather than slow access speeds.
However if you have important stuff on it, I'm sure there's no harm in giving a new board a go, however don't use the drive model as reference, you need to get the exact same serial number board, get yourself on ebay and general googling of that serial and you'll probably find something (also why it's a good idea to buy drives in pairs) :) I've done this successfully in the past.
What it could also be are the drives bearings not allowing the drive to move freely, for this you'll have to try the freezer trick, moisture tight bag and put it in for 30 mins (I think - just google it) I've never tried this but tens to have a reasonable recovery rate, some times you have to repeat, as when it warms it gets the same problem, and I know some people have left it in the freezer while running.
The other option is that the OS in knackered, in which case plug it in to another machine as a secondary drive?
Other than those you are looking at profe$$ional recovery :(
Bizarrely, I've just rebooted and everything's up and running as normal.
Needless to say I'm backing up like a demon! :panic:
Can't trust the drive anymore though - should I just go for any 'popular brand'?
The best you can do is go based on reviews, even good drives die just just need to be prepared when they do ;-) it might be a little happier now it's cooled down a bit?
I think I'll just go for a bog-standard Seagate Barracuda 1TB job plus a 1 or 2 TB external. As you rightly suggest; a foolproof back-up plan is more important than drive quality I suppose.
Before I make a mistake though; is SATA 3 / 6 etc backwards compatible? I think my board is only SATA 1...
:)
Drives are all on par with each other these days, there aren't really any standout manufacturers. Choose the one with the longest manufacturer warranty is the best recommendation, so if it dies in a couple of years you might still stand to have it replaced. You could purchase an 'enterprise' class of drive that would be more reliable, but I think the cost of one of these far outweighs the alternative option of buying two regular drives.
I would also recommend purchasing an external caddy and fitting your own drives for backup, external built in solutions are not ideal if you need to replace a drive as the whole unit has to go back and often the caddy's can be the cause of death from poor ventilation - my Seagate FreeAgent Pro died horribly from overheating.
In terms of backup, don't bother with a proprietary 2-drive mirrored external jobby either, this is just as bad if one drive inside dies as again the unit all needs swapping out or even if not you won't be able to simply take out one drive and copy off the contents because they generally use a proprietary RAID so you can't just plug the drive in and have Windows detect it.
If you want to get serious about it consider having a HP microserver running as a central backup server with your choice of OS and maybe RAID some drives on that or use software RAID to mirror the contents, then have an external backup drive unit as well that you can store safely. You can never have too many redundant copies, but just remember RAID redundancy alone is not a backup solution.
SATA is always backwards compatible :)
Glad you got your data off it. As the guys above have said there isn't much difference in the drives these days. I still tend to favor the Samsung F3/F4's but thats because *touch wood* I've never had issues with them.
Another +1 for RAID solution if you want to keep a backup of the whole drive. Personally my storage is not that important and I would rather have the extra space and the inconviance of having to re-download anything lost. Documents & game saves are all in dropbox and I run a .bat every so often which puts a basic .dir text dump of my servers drives into dropbox aswell so I know what I'm missing if one goes down.
Bought another baracudda today, that'll do.
Busy whacking the data back on now. One strange issue's cropped up though - my WinMail store folder works when accessed on C:\ but when I access it on D:\ it gets corrupted...
A Babararacucudada?
Well the drive's just died again. Five months....... :(
Explorer started to slow down and freeze then on reboot I got 'Bootmgr is missing' or something. Tried repair from DVD and it fails to repair it.
So, I suppose it's off to buy yet another hard drive tomorrow.
I had my email directory on C: - is there any way to mount the drive and recover my files from it or is it completely f**ked? Will a SATA/IDE to USB cable work from a laptop and will I just see a standard file directory?
:disappointed:
You will still be able to access the files on it, the boot record probably just needs repairing for you to be able to boot off it. Is this what you tried? (http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/fixing-bootmgr-is-missing-error-while-trying-to-boot-windows-vista/)
Get your new HDD and try installing the old drive as a second drive, let windows pick it up and you should be able to access the files on it. Maybe bang it in the freezer first for 20 mins in an anti-static bag as suggested previously in case its the drive bearings on the way out causing issues.
Also bear in mind your data could be corrupted on there even if its recoverable. For anyone not running a parity based RAID system its worth looking into how to do MD5 checks of files, there are programs that will do it for you dead easy so you can be sure your backed up data is accurate. I've used this previously http://www.md5summer.org/ (http://www.md5summer.org/)
Thanks Yep, that's what I tried.
I can't be arsed swapping drives around so I'll just buy another one for Windaz.
I'll hook up the old windows drive via USB to my laptop (if that will work) and get what I can before it finally grinds to a halt. Why are drives so sh*t these days?
Last full backup was about four weeks ago and I'd been doing it weekly since the last failure until recently. Typical... :(
I'm also going to look at cloud-based real-time back up for my critical stuff if encryption is possible.
Though this was quite good:
(http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/web05/2012/6/2/0/enhanced-buzz-wide-7493-1338612978-2.jpg)
I don't think that graph bodes well for the future really. Before you always had choice and people knew where the fastest or most reliable HDDs were coming from at any one time because there was enough competition to make it worthwhile for each company to focus on a selling point to be the best at whether it be reliability, quietness, speed, economy, etc. It's all a numbers game now and reliability seems to be an afterthought.
I'd pay double current prices for a HDD that I knew wouldn't wear out within two years...
I take it solid state drives are still prohibitively expensive?
You could buy an enterprise grade drive you know, there's plenty of models about. But yes, they are about double the price. You want to look at Seagate Constellation drives or the Western Digital RE range (they have a 5 year warranty I think).
Solid state isn't prohibitively expensive but capacities are still low and it's not a good choice of backup medium. Decent HDD + cloud/external drive is your best bet I think.
Was going to go for a Crucial M4 SSD but I'll take your advice.
I'm at the mercy of PC World as I need to be up and running by tonight but at least my local has a business centre - I'll take a look there.
If they have more than one model actually in stock I'll be stunned!!!... ;D
What's the actual volume of data you're talking about? If you were going to buy an SSD it would make much more sense to have that as the windows boot drive so it's nice and fast and use another drive for backup purposes/data store. I have less than 10Gb in work/client files (which is surprising to me actually) so I could put them on my SSD if I wanted and duplicate them on my regular HDDs, but it makes more sense to have it all backed up from regular HDD anyway and not to fill the SSDs. No one really knows yet how long some of these SSDs will last especially with frequent write wear, controllers seem to be the issue with them. In another few years they might be ideal for backup purposes though.
Good luck bending over for PC World though, I can't imagine they will be cheap if they have any in stock! :worried:
It's purely for the boot drive (C:\)
Current one is 500Gb which caters for Vista and Program files with about 100Gb to spare.
nobody made hard drives like quantum. Their 850mb & 3.2gb fireballs probably 2 of the best drives ever, along with the 6.4gb. Seagate gobbled them up & managed to sort out their high failure rate a few years afterwards.
Ended up buying a Samsung 840 SSD as it was either that or a poxy 5400rpm caviar HDD... Wish I hadn't now.
This is not going well. It's unbelievably slow - takes about two minutes to boot up on a fresh Vista64 install and it frequently appears to hang for long periods of time during Windows Update. Have I got some settings in BIOS wrong?
Running on ACHI.
Now got the 'BOOTMGR missing' message again.
I'll take it back tomorrow and just get a normal HDD. :disappointed:
There's something seriously wrong here I feel. When trying to access my data drive I *occaisionally* get an Explorer hang for about two minutes. Could it be something to do with a faulty controller? I doubt it as research suggests BOOTMGR error can only be a hard drive problem... Vista install was desperately slow though - about 90 minutes.
Any ideas? :(
try pulling the faulty HDD & see if your machine runs better. Dodgy HDD can seriously slow down your machine
What Egg said - it could still be trying to install the boot sector on the duff drive and not the new one. Best off pulling out the old drive altogether to eliminate it as a potential fault - if you're still getting issues I can promise you its not the SSD and its probably the HDD controller at fault (or a very remotely possibility dodgy RAM is causing write corruption, though that wouldn't explain the slow speed).
I always install with a single hard drive installed so it's not that. Even with my data drive out, Windows install took about 90 minutes. That's not right.
Gah.... this is all I need right now. :(
As I don't have the time to rebuild the system myself, what's the best place to go to for system builds these days?
I think you'd do just as well finding a local independant that can take a look at it today as you might get it fixed by this afternoon, unless you meant buying a new system completely?
Yeah, was just thinking of a new system less probably the graphics card.
To be honest, I have trust issues with giving my system over to 'techs' and I wouldn't be able to get it to them until next week anyway.
I'm also reading that having floppy support enabled in BIOS can cripple a system (I had reset the BIOS to default before the reinstall) but that wouldn't explain the 'Explorer not responding' issues I had prior to this. I just can't tell which drive is having the issue (although C:\ is very slow with D:\ disconnected) or if it's a cable/controller problem.
People are also suggesting changing out the cables (both SATA and power) but let's be honest are they really likely to fail? I could be chasing my tail forever and still not find the fault. :(
It could be a SATA cable issue (power cables don't fail, they either power or don't), its an easy thing to try swapping over and checking just to eliminate it. You probably have some spares about that came with your motherboard so its worth a shot.
I suppose I could try that. Indications are leaning to the issue being with the connection on the windows drive anyway as it's hella slow to install then boot etc.
Would a sh*tty cable on C: affect file copy from/to D: and cause hangs? I suppose it could...
Does it matter which SATA port the cables go into? The windows drive is currently connected with an L-shaped one tucked tightly right behind the graphics card. I don't have another L-shaped connector so would need to use a different port.
Thanks for everyone's help so far. :
Lol... just had someone say it's more than likely a RAM problem. :panic:
I've always run Corsair matched pairs so not cheap to replace 4Gb worth.
I refuse to believe stuff just 'dies'. #indenial
FFS....
have you checked ram prices lately ? 8gig of decent corsair will only set you back £40 now
download/run mem test, see if that sorts it (btw takes hours to do a full scan)
also, check your cooling, make sure the m/b heat sinks aren't full of dust/fulff etc..
If he's getting errors/problems that quickly I doubt he'd need a full scan to identify dodgy RAM. My first 32GB quad channel set had a duff pair in it, I was getting crashes once a week perhaps and occasional file corruption errors, memtest86 had picked up the errors within about 5 mins, if that. If he leaves it running for an hour or so he'll know for sure (I don't think its the RAM personally).
It doesn't matter which SATA port you use btw, SATA is good like that!
Thanks again.
Rather than rush back to the shop just to get another HDD, I'm (for once) going to do the sane, methodical thing and reseat everything on the mobo first. I'll switch SATA cables to different ports and/or replace, too.
Update:
Grabbed some spare SATA cables and replaced the one on the C:\
On a hunch I put the old C:\ back in and it booted right away (with no BOOTMGR error either).
So, it seems at this stage that it might just have been the SATA cable at fault as suggested. What's the bet I'll regret writing this later!... :worried:
I'm guessing that it wasn't allowing enough 'throughput' for the drive, therefore it wasn't finding 'bootmgr' in time before a time-out? And when it did boot, it wasn't allowing enough data to pass through hence the Explorer freeze-ups? :dunno:
What are the chances of PCW giving me a refund on the SSD?... :roll:
PC World are pretty good on refunds actually, I've bought and took back enough overpriced routers there in my time!
How do cables just degrade and not just fail?
could be a million and one different things... cables are normally pretty much ok tho...
but... it's digital so it's switching on and off to send 1's and 0's
8388608 bits in 1 megabyte
so at 100meg/sec there's 838,860,800 bits - or timed on's/off's going though that cable...
guess it doesn't take much for a few of those to be messed up... guessing there's some kind of error checking built in... tho it's probably only very light because of the speeds involved...
(p.s. I haven't looked into how sata works... so that's just rough... it'll be something like that tho)
Cheers all.
Back for 'Saga III' in a few months!
...weeks, days... ;)
Did the cable hang onto/over your graphics card at all? Perhaps it was a heat related death. Glad you're back in ship shape though 8)
No, the cables were routed away from the mobo/graphics card, outside the 'inner case', then back in just enough to connect to the HDD.
Of course it could just have been reseating it that worked - but unlikely as I did try that yesterday.
Cheers all.
Reminds me of when I convinced a friend to build his computer. I was surprised he did it without issue, but something "blew up" when he turned it on. We spent two days, and a lot of money going through the components trying to figure out what had blown. Did the logical things first, PSU, then Mobo etc.
Just as he was about to admit defeat and take it to a computer shop for them to sort it out, it dawn on me that he'd been using the same power plug from the start. The fault turned out to be the plugs fuse had blown, D'oh!