Backup?

[TeaLeaf]

p.s next time you edit my post, atleast you can do is tell me your doint it, instead of just doing it. it p***** me off! thank you

And so does constant swearing where none is needed.  Grow up a bit and drop the swearing.  For the record though, nobody edited your post.  Our forum software automatically deletes/removes offending words.

As to your reply, if you seriously believe drives do not fail then go ahead and cross your fingers.  All we're saying is that blindly putting your head in the sand and ignoring the fact that HDDs do fail is pretty daft.  In fact, running 5xHDDs in a nice fast Raid0 means you are precisely 5 times more likely to see a failure than running it on a single drive.

As for blandly stating WD are not a good brand, well there's a lengthy thread on the forum about it if you want to look for it.  Most brands take a hammering from someone, including your Seagate, so it's pretty much pot luck.  What is universally accepted is that WD is a major brand and unlikely to be completely pants as it would otherwise be out of business remarkably quickly.  

Backing up is your own decision, but don't deride people for doing it or blame them for 'mistreating their disks' when clearly that has nothing to do with it.

[b00n]

I still have the HDD from a 1994 Gateway P90. Hasn't been used for a few years now, but I hooked it up a few months ago and it still works fine.  So does every drive I still have from the desktop machines I've had over the years.  They've survived sitting in dusty cupboards, moving house at least 4 times, with nothing but an antistatic bag for protection.

Oh yeah - every one of them is a Western Digital drive.  They're the only drives I buy or recommend now because I've never seen one fail, and I can't say that of any other manufacturer.

Having disks that have run for 2-3 years doesn't say to me that they're good disks. I would expect at *least* double if not triple that time from any disk I buy - get back to me and let me know if your Maxtors are still running after 10 years.

drives dont "just" fail.
i kinda dont care if you have experienced something else with your drives, the reason of your drives die and mine dossent are propedly becuse my drives has an excilet enviroment and the drives are high quality drives.

It is a plain fact that hard drives do "just" fail, and actually a much more likely reason that both you and I have never had a drive die is that we are very lucky.  Hard drives can and do die at any time for a number of reasons regardless of their environment. A good environment might reduce the chances of a failure but it is still a matter of time before it happens.  The storage expert guy you met would be able to confirm this, as would anyone who has worked in IT infrastructure.

That said - I don't do backups either but this is purely because I have no data that I care that much about.  

[BrotherTobious]

I am also a memeber of the WD club and now the Samsung, due to 3 Maxtors dying on me.

I wont go near them and I wont recommend them.

[Tutonic]

drives dont "just" fail.
i kinda dont care if you have experienced something else with your drives, the reason of your drives die and mine dossent are propedly becuse my drives has an excilet enviroment and the drives are high quality drives.
(no WD raptor or velasiaptor are not quality drives)
drives lifetime is limited by the enviroment, if your drives are 60c celcius then no they will die.

Hard Drives contain moving parts, which renders them vulnerable to wear & tear - regardless of how well you look after them.

If your theory were true, then I wouldn't have to bother with expensive RAID setups in my servers. I could just buy "quality" drives and forget about it... then get fired when one of them keels over and wipes out a Directors mailbox.

Even Hard Drive manufaturers know and admit that all drives will fail eventually regardless of quality, that's why they provide MTTF (Mean Time To Fail) figures.

<--------edited by Penfold-------->

Back on-topic, Acronis (http://www.acronis.com) do some very nice local-backup products using disk-images. I would reccomend them.

[Claw]

And so does constant swearing where none is needed.  Grow up a bit and drop the swearing.  For the record though, nobody edited your post.  Our forum software automatically deletes/removes offending words.

As to your reply, if you seriously believe drives do not fail then go ahead and cross your fingers.  All we're saying is that blindly putting your head in the sand and ignoring the fact that HDDs do fail is pretty daft.  In fact, running 5xHDDs in a nice fast Raid0 means you are precisely 5 times more likely to see a failure than running it on a single drive.


Backing up is your own decision, but don't deride people for doing it or blame them for 'mistreating their disks' when clearly that has nothing to do with it.

<--------edited by Penfold-------->

but the thing is, i have told MY EXPERIENCE about the drives i have had for years, in controlled and uncontrolled enviroments. now if YOUR DRIVE dies, it does not effecy my statistics and i feal sorry for your data loss, it sucks. i do not say im perfect i have whiped few raid arrays by accident, but that does not effect that my drives lives...

and to be on the topic i even provided him with a faily solution.

<--------edited by Penfold-------->

<--------edited by Penfold-------->

<--------edited by Penfold-------->

- claw

[kregoron]

Disk drives die, it is a mathematical fact, simple as stated drives are mechanical and therefor with time they will die and fail period..

There exist no such thing as a fail free drive, ask any hdd manufacturer.

over the ages ive had around 10 disks die on me within the first two years of their lifetime, (and i buy around 10-14 new disks a year) and in my book thats a fairly good rate, and yeah my disks run in a perfect inviroment, dust free, stable 18degree temp around the disks at all times, and mounted in shock/vibration mounts.

I had a talk with a WD tech a few years back at a conference in Berlin, and we talked a lot about disk failure rate, and he told about 40% of the disk they get back from failures (and this is across their whole production line cheap ones to top dogs) is due to a single dust grain getting into the disk in the manufacturing process, which is nothing your computer enviroment can do anything about AT ALL. rest is often due to reading pins touching the platters at some point and disk dies simple.



Btw there is no maxtor, maxtor is dead.. finally..



On topic: After talking with oth the other night, i know its offsite backup he wants, no home storage
For long while i used idrives service, its not hte cheapest i know, but their service was awsome, best part was, that back then you could negotiate with em, example i didnt need their 500gb in the family package, but still wanted the service for multiple puters, so i sent em a mail with my wishes and they sent me instantly a price estimate back, fair price with a bit of discount but again they werent the cheapest afaik

[Claw]

Btw there is no maxtor, maxtor is dead.. finally..

what do you have against maxtor?

- claw

[delanvital]

I just use DropBox. Even if I for some reason should end up deleting my locally stored backup files, and thus activating the sync to the online DropBox folder, thus removing them from the DropBox S3-based storage, I can always go online and restore any deleted file for up to 30 days.

And, even if that fails, for some odd technical reason, they are kind and helpful in restoring your data manually.

I am still surprised that even the 2-5GB versions are free.

[kregoron]

what do you have against maxtor?

- claw

That they were crap, but if werent aware, maxtor is no more, and havent been for a while, they are now all Seagate
http://www.maxtor.com/home-en-us.html

But Lets stop going OT and answer Oths question

[Whitey]

drives dont "just" fail.
i kinda dont care if you have experienced something else with your drives, the reason of your drives die and mine dossent are propedly becuse my drives has an excilet enviroment and the drives are high quality drives.
(no WD raptor or velasiaptor are not quality drives)
drives lifetime is limited by the enviroment, if your drives are 60c celcius then no they will die.

I look after a Datacentre with hundreds of drives ranging from SATA to Fibre Attached 15k high end drives.  Due to the large quantity of drives we use, we get failures on a regular basis (every month or two) and they are housed in computer rooms with climate control and filtered power from a UPS.  

Drives do "just" fail but it's your risk, I was just trying to be helpfull.

[delanvital]

Dropbox - I would like to add, that you can up the 2GB to 5GB quite easily for free - and that the 50GB solution is like $10 a month, so no biggie - especially with the greenback being dirt cheap atm.

Might I remind people to stay on topic - and that includes you, Claw. Do a new topic if you fancy discussing disk failure rates.

[Claw]

That they were crap, but if werent aware, maxtor is no more, and havent been for a while, they are now all Seagate
http://www.maxtor.com/home-en-us.html

But Lets stop going OT and answer Oths question

<--------edited by Penfold-------->

Drives do "just" fail but it's your risk, I was just trying to be helpfull.

i know we all are, but unfortinetly someone has something agains me and my posts. so i do just think that il just go...

[kregoron]

mine maxtor in my rack works just fine...
crap? maxtor made some good cheap discs, you got what you paid for.
and if your buying 10-14 discs a year (wich i doubt you do, and its not all what i doubdt about you)

<--------edited by Penfold-------->

[Claw]

Well gratz, your the first member of this community to make a fair discussion personal.
but then again, dont really care for what you may think

:roflmao:

then don't bring it up..

- claw

[Snokio]

/offtopic
 
In terms of reliability, Samsung is far the best, we hardly see them, the worst is probably Seagate, once the most reliable is now the most unreliable, although the Maxtor brand is sort of still around, but still essentially a Seagate, Maxtor drives had both reliable and unreliable models, depends on the model numbers. Although barring in mind that there are more Seagate drives out in the market than any other manufacturer