1 TB Backup HDD Failing

shatteredx · Apr 2, 2017

Sounds like the disk is about to completely fail. Transfer whatever you can off of it ASAP and replace it with a new hard drive.

In the future, you may want to consider adding an online backup solution like CrashPlan or Backblaze.
http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-online-backup-service/

vanzandt · Apr 2, 2017

The good news is it still has some value...
Surf is in the market for a new boat anchor.

justrading · Apr 2, 2017

vanzandt said:
The good news is it still has some value...
Surf is in the market for a new boat anchor.
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Wicked.

Yeah, I'm getting the message here that it's just junk now so get a new one. I'll head out Tuesday and get that sorted out.

Trader13 · Apr 3, 2017

justrading said:
The on-board drives are configured RAID 0, something Dell decided as I knew nothing about RAID at the time...
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I'm surprised that Dell would configure your drives as RAID 0, which is striping for speed. There is no redundancy in RAID 0, making the "R" in RAID 0 a misnomer.

With blazing fast SSD's in modern PC's, does anyone even use RAID 0 anymore?

Scataphagos · Apr 3, 2017

Trader13 said:
I'm surprised that Dell would configure your drives as RAID 0, which is striping for speed. There is no redundancy in RAID 0, making the "R" in RAID 0 a misnomer.

With blazing fast SSD's in modern PC's, does anyone even use RAID 0 anymore?
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All of my Dell workstations came with RAID default. My rigs are now 8 years old. Perhaps they don't do that any longer??

mokwit · Apr 8, 2017

Tim Smith said:
It seems that some people just love to learn the hard way.

Let's summarise the "laws of backup" :

(1) If its important, back it up to more than one device, typically the "rule of thumb" is that for anything critical, you should backup to minimum 3 independent devices, and preferably one of the devices is located at a different geographical location to your other backup devices and/or main computer.
(2) RAID MUST be considered to be ONE logical device. Therefore backing up to more than one device, as per rule number one, would mean multiple RAID devices. Trust me RAID is not infallible, I've seen lots of nasty corruption on RAID, hence RAID IS ONLY ONE DEVICE !
(3) Replace the word "RAID" in (2) with "cloud storage provider". Same rule. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
(4) Test your backups regularly. An untested backup is NOT a backup. (and I mean manual human testing, not hitting the "verify" button in your software).

P.S. Added bonus... for those wondering "why minimum 3 copies" its called N+1 redundancy. If you only made two copies, you would be at N redundancy, which is fine ... until one of your backup devices fails. Then you're down to one, and you have no idea when that remaining device might fail. Therefore with N+1 redundancy (or three copies in laymans terms), you would be down to two working independent copies which buys you more safe time to fix the third.
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Add: have a time lag between backups as some ransomware is set to lie dormant for a while.

Junos · May 31, 2019

Which brand of it ? Dell ? Dell really makes so bad hard drives really here ? I do not get it. Do what Tim Smith recommend, and have backup even for backup and that's really it, no less than that for sure. I can recommend to go with Samsung drives for external ones.