HARD DRIVE (failure)

C

cjjeans

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I learned last night what exactly happens when you bump your hard drive just a little too hard. Never again will I purchase an external hard drive - and heres why... After several quotes from local data recovery agencies in the greater New York City area the quotes for service are staggering. The lowest quote I received was $500 and ranging up to $1500 depending on what was damaged. In my particular situation I found that the beeping sound and and clicking noises that my hard drive were making were do to the HDDrive "farming". Its called farming because the head and the platter meet during impact. The head leaves furrows in the platter which cause damage to both the platter and the head. The end result is a irreparable hard drive. Sure I may get some of my data back - depending on the sectors affected - but from what I gathered its A) too expensive and B) highly unlikely i'll get much back. 1TB of data down the drain. Past and current employers work - down the drain. I am friggin about the lose it... my sanity that is.
 
Yes, hard drive failures are INCREDIBLY annoying, especially if you lose important data, and a lot of it... which is very likely with the sizes of current hard drives.

And yes, $500 sounds like what a professional recovery service would cost.

It's very expensive (clean room, spare parts, equipment etc.) and takes great skill to do data recovery properly - especially when hardware damage is also present.

Just back up things on more than 1 place next time.

It's annoying, but it saves important data... and hard drives are cheapo these days. You can even set up a Raid 1 or Raid 0 + 1 / JBod / whatever array, for not too expensive compared to what pain and cost there would be in a case of failure.

And your hard drive will fail someday - even not accidentally. Hard drives (and fans I guess) are actually the most quickly "worn-down" part of a computer - because they spin mechanically 100% of the time (if not spun down, but that's rather rare unless you have multiples).

That's why the hopes (not the reality, yet) for SSD's are so great.
 
I back up my data on my home data server (holds all my movies and music in digital form as well) and on a similarly set up machine at my friend's house not but 10 minutes away. I learned from the same mistake you made back in college. Paper due the next day. Spend 2 weeks working on it. Computer was killed by a lightning strike directly on my apartment complex. I stayed up for 24hrs straight working on the same paper. I'll never leave anything vulnerable to destruction like that ever again.
 
Holy shit Boon. That's gotta suck epic balls...

I've luckily never lost anything important due to a failure. I lost a few games back in the day when I dropped a 500mb hard drive on the floor (slipped from my hand) after which it never made a sound anymore... but since then I haven't had a failure.

I replace my drives often (less than 2 years cycle) usually though... with larger ones :-D
 
Yeah, I had an internal HD fail rather suddenly-before I got a backup UPS. Fortunately, my wife's a programmer and one of the guys at her company, the Network admin. I think, knew how to do this and did it for me for the cost of a dinner-very cheap compared to the alternatives. He was able to retrieve all of my work and personal files, but it did take him a few hours to do that. Since then I keep backed up on a spare HD and an external HD. You can never be too safe. The bottom line is, how important is your data to you.
 
I've heard some crazy shit; one guy threw is HDD in the freezer and was able to fire it up and save the date; but CJ, if the data is worth more than 500...that is the question
 
Logical failures (overwritten FAT table / "journal" entries etc.) are easier/cheaper to fix...

Heads scraping against the surface is MUCH harder (and sometimes impossible).
 
[quote1245299604=balls2dawall]
I've heard some crazy shit; one guy threw is HDD in the freezer and was able to fire it up and save the date; but CJ, if the data is worth more than 500...that is the question
[/quote1245299604]

I actually was able to recover some stuff off of an old Quantam Fireball 20 gig drive a few years ago doing this. Ziplock bag in the freezer for 20 mins if I remember correctly lol
 
CJ I had the same thing happen just a few months ago. I learned that if you have anything of value, back it up, then back up the back up. 3 generations is key to safety. I didn't bump mine, it just suddenly died. (less than a year-old)
 
On the bright side my shit is working fine :)
That's my favorite comment to use on people who walk into our Help Desk and start explaining their problems to me. I'm collocated with the Help Desk but I don't work with them. So I wait for them to go through their whole spiel then hit with that. I wish I had a camera because their faces are priceless.
 
My first computer I built, I installed everything (250 GB Sata 2) from my old hard drive, gave it to my brother to use which he reformated. Next day, when making a ghost image, knocked my case over, HD crashed. Lost everything......sad day......Luckly, my HD was the only thing to go out.
 
i started taking massive amounts of pictures of my son when he was born and i didnt want to loose any (who prints now a days :eek: ). so, i got a dlink (NAS) DNS-321. i put in two 1TB WD green HDDs. there is a linux script you can run to backup HD A to HD B on a schedule. HD A gets everything saved to it, then HD B makes an image every night at 11pm.

any files added or deleted get updated onto B, but if nothing changes since the last back, no image is made.

its great to have data in 3 places (including the local machine)
 
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