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.   

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)?




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...  

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! 

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?

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?

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/

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: