Hard Drive Failure? In 3... 2... 1...
 

Hi folks.

Just wondering if any of you happen to have some experience with a clicking hard drive. A bit of research on Google brings up, much to my terror, the hard drive click of death. It sounds an awful lot like my own symptoms.

I was playing a game and it crashed. I heard a clicking which I had thought was a cable clicking against a fan blade or something, but it was coming from a hard drive. Fearing a hard drive failure, I checked windows explorer and the two partitions of that hard drive vanished.

Because I am running an additional GPU and it's in the top slot for thermal reasons, whenever I boot up my machine, I get a blank screen through the post and up until Windows gets properly started (the Welcome screen) when it finally tells my GTX 670 to start displaying something. When I rebooted the computer, I sat with a blank screen about a minute longer than it usually takes (:love: SSD: less than twenty seconds usually) and since the noise kept on, I decided to turn off the computer entirely with the power button.

No issues of any kind anymore. Hard drive is back on. No clicking. A few hundred paging operation errors on a hard drive and a handful of flushing failures. Looks like nothing permanent. I've sent a message to a local computer shop but it's Thursday evening so I might not hear from them until next week. In the meantime, I'm considering my options.

I'll try running a disk check, which shouldn't interfere with any GIMPS work. I'll backup its contents to an external drive (they should just barely fit) but I don't know what else and if I should be concerned for imminent catastrophic failure, or just assume the much more likely scenario of a random hardware problem fixed by turning it off and back on again.

Note the drive was scavenged from an older computer so it has been in one computer for about two or so years, wiped and placed into my new one where it has happily lived for nine months. Not exactly new, not exactly old.

Don't bother with the disk check. It's gone. Try copying anything you care about ASAP.

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;355169]Don't bother with the disk check. It's gone. Try copying anything you care about ASAP.[/QUOTE]
+1

Alright. I'm on it as we speak.

This sounds like a pretty big deal. I was a bit skeptical of teh mihgty internetz telling me my HDD was about to kick the bucket but I'm going to take this seriously based on what you've been saying.

The users folder being on the separate hard drive has been a nice thing as far as the SSD is concerned but I'm not looking forward to the possibility of temporarily losing it. I'll see what my external drive situation is after I've added the SSD image (I've been regularly backing up the users folder already) and decide how I feel about keeping the HDD until it kicks the bucket.

I'm trying to weight the risk against the cost of mitigating it entirely. I honestly don't know if the clicking is a sure-fire you-be-boned-son thing or not.

I'm seriously considering just keeping my backups in a more secure place and just buying a drive and replacing everything if and when the drive actually goes. Then again, it feels silly to be putting up with something that might break. I just don't want to waste time fixing something that isn't a problem. I'll see what the computer shop thinks.

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;355169]Don't bother with the disk check. It's gone. Try copying anything you care about ASAP.[/QUOTE]+1

TheMawn,

You may, just possibly, be able to copy off files which, if you continue normal operation, may no longer be copyable. You must treat this as a serious disk failure until proven otherwise[sup]*[/sup]. All you lose by doing so is a little time, while proceeding as if normal risks more extensive data loss than you already have.

[I]Added: (posted before I saw your most recent post)

[sup]*[/sup] by professional disk diagnosis

- - -

[/I]
[QUOTE=TheMawn;355176]This sounds like a pretty big deal. I was a bit skeptical of teh mihgty internetz telling me my HDD was about to kick the bucket

< snip > don't know if the clicking is a sure-fire you-be-boned-son thing or not.[/QUOTE]It's not normal for hard drives to produce unprecedented clicking sounds, [U]followed closely by partition disappearances[/U].

[quote]how I feel about keeping the HDD until it kicks the bucket.[/quote]How do you feel about the time and expense of losing data on the HDD?

[quote]I'm seriously considering just keeping my backups in a more secure place and just buying a drive and replacing everything if and when the drive actually goes.[/quote]How do you feel about the time and expense of losing data on the clicking HDD that you might not have lost if you had promptly switched it all to a new drive?

[quote]Then again, it feels silly to be putting up with something that might break. I just don't want to waste time fixing something that isn't a problem.[/quote]Clicking followed by partition disappearance [U]IS NOT NORMAL.

Something is already broken.

You already have a problem.
[/U]

The image is too big. I'll just pray my SSD doesn't crap out in the time my HDD is dead if and when it happens.

To be honest, this is making me want to just get this over with and buy the damned drive right now.

[QUOTE=TheMawn;355178]The image is too big. I'll just pray my SSD doesn't crap out in the time my HDD is dead if and when it happens.

To be honest, this is making me want to just get this over with and buy the damned drive right now.[/QUOTE]

That's what I would do. If you care about the data at all.

I wouldn't trust that old drive for anything, even to last an hour more.

Alright. Thanks folks. During the last little while I've Googled some more. Most people who've started a thread asking about the click of death followed by perfectly fine operation have been getting more or less the same: that HDD's are doomed once the clicking happens. OP's said stuff along the lines of "I had no idea this was even possible" so it would appear most of the internet agrees with you that I might have a dead drive when I come back from my shower or it might last a few more weeks yet.

At any rate, the data is all backed up, except for the image of my SSD. I'll see if I have time tomorrow. A Saturday Project otherwise.


My SSD is C: Games and other software are on E: Users partition is F: OS Image Partition is Z: (who doesn't want a Z: drive, really?)

I'm thinking this whole job would be super easy if I could makes the partitions of the new drive F: and Z: again and maybe fool the computer into thinking nothing every happened, instead of messing around with a whole bunch of dead links to a mysterious F: drive. Does anyone know if I can do that?

[QUOTE=TheMawn;355180]Alright. Thanks folks. During the last little while I've Googled some more. Most people who've started a thread asking about the click of death followed by perfectly fine operation have been getting more or less the same: that HDD's are doomed once the clicking happens. OP's said stuff along the lines of "I had no idea this was even possible" so it would appear most of the internet agrees with you that I might have a dead drive when I come back from my shower or it might last a few more weeks yet.

At any rate, the data is all backed up, except for the image of my SSD. I'll see if I have time tomorrow. A Saturday Project otherwise.


My SSD is C: Games and other software are on E: Users partition is F: OS Image Partition is Z: (who doesn't want a Z: drive, really?)

I'm thinking this whole job would be super easy if I could makes the partitions of the new drive F: and Z: again and maybe fool the computer into thinking nothing every happened, instead of messing around with a whole bunch of dead links to a mysterious F: drive. Does anyone know if I can do that?[/QUOTE]

Yes. When you have the new drive installed (use different letters then), you can use the [URL="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg309170.aspx"]Disk Management console[/URL] to rename partitions, except maybe C:.

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;355181]Yes. When you have the new drive installed (use different letters then), you can use the [URL="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg309170.aspx"]Disk Management console[/URL] to rename partitions, except maybe C:.[/QUOTE]

So if I take out the old drive, and put all the new stuff on, say G: and Y: for the new drive, and then reassign the letters back to F: and Z: (can I even re-use the old letters?) will windows think that the F: drive is back in action and have everything work? Or will it still not be able to find all the old users stuff?

[QUOTE=TheMawn;355180]Alright. Thanks folks. During the last little while I've Googled some more. Most people who've started a thread asking about the click of death followed by perfectly fine operation have been getting more or less the same: that HDD's are doomed once the clicking happens.[/QUOTE]It's not that they're 100% for-sure absolutely doomed.

It's that without a professional disk diagnosis, [U]you can't be confident that it won't be[/U] 100% for-sure absolutely doomed if you continue to use it "normally" (as opposed to immediate just-copy-all-the-data while you still can) for even a few minutes.

[quote]OP's said stuff along the lines of "I had no idea this was even possible"[/quote]Amazingly, [I]computer hardware does fail![/I] It was happening before I was born, it happened all through my working career, and it still happens now. It's not magic. :-D

(Actually, you're all lucky to be using HDDs that come sealed inside a case nowadays. I've swapped removable disk packs (with exposed writing surfaces that I could theoretically have put a smudge on while I wrestled with it) in and out of disk drives. Please believe me that it's better if you just can't touch, or even see, the disk surface.)

[quote]I'm thinking this whole job would be super easy if I could makes the partitions of the new drive F: and Z: again and maybe fool the computer into thinking nothing every happened, instead of messing around with a whole bunch of dead links to a mysterious F: drive. Does anyone know if I can do that?[/quote]Of course you can do that. (I've done that lots of times.)

It's a good idea, just as long as you don't try to fool the computer into accepting two F: partitions or two Z: partitions simultaneously and somehow divining which one you mean for any particular operation!! :-D

[QUOTE=cheesehead;355183].Amazingly, [I]computer hardware does fail![/I] It was happening before I was born, it happened all through my working career, and it still happens now. It's not magic. :-D[/QUOTE]

Sorry, I wasn't quite clear. What I meant was the people didn't think it was possible for a hard drive to recover from the click of death.

[QUOTE=TheMawn;355185]Sorry, I wasn't quite clear. What I meant was the people didn't think it was possible for a hard drive to recover from the click of death.[/QUOTE]Well, disks do have some spare tracks that can be used when a single, or small number of, tracks fail. The hardware's firmware takes care of that without user notification, usually.

It's sorta like exchanging a flat tire with a spare -- doesn't heal the flat tire's damage, but allows continued overall vehicle operation for a while with the spare in its place. Except that on the disk, the physical tracks can't be moved around, but the controller can make a note to itself: "Whenever there's an operation request for track 1123, use track 8879 instead."

(That's what happened on one of my HDDs. It was in the shop for one repair, when their routine diagnostic noted that the HDD was using a large percentage of its spare tracks. The HDD was still usable, but with a smaller and smaller margin of spare tracks. I agreed with the shop's recommendation to replace it with a new (faster, larger) HDD after copying all partitions from old to new.)

Of course, a "click" probably involves more than a couple of bits dropped on a track.

Good info!

As for the drive letters... I take out the old drive, put in the new, drop everything into whatever partitions I make and them rename them to F: and Z: and everything should be back to normal?

[QUOTE=TheMawn;355195]
As for the drive letters... I take out the old drive, put in the new, drop everything into whatever partitions I make and them rename them to F: and Z: and everything should be back to normal?[/QUOTE]Maybe I should just say that if renaming works for you, that's fine and dandy.

- - -

The following might be confusing:

If the old and new disks are not mounted on the same system at the same time (i.e., you're copying data to the new disk from a backup rather than directly from the old disk, and the backup isn't an F: or a Z:), you can have F: and Z: partitions on the new disk right from the start.

Actually, F: and Z: are just virtual names for the operating system to use. The disks have [I]labels[/I], like "DATA1" or "XYZ" which are real names written on the disk when it's formatted, that they carry around when you dismount and move them, but they don't actually carry around the F: and Z: designations. Those are assigned by the OS when the disks are mounted (or the system is booted).

Often, a certain physical "slot" for a disk (or partition) will always have the same letter designation by the OS, and whatever physical disk is mounted at that physical position is designated E:, for instance.

Windows assigns letters in a certain fixed order. C: is the first HDD, D: is the second, E: is the third, and so on. If a disk labelled DATA1 is in the second "slot" and a disk labelled XYZ is in the third slot, Windows will show that D: is DATA1 and E: is XYZ. Now, if you interchange those two disks, Windows will show that D: is XYZ and E: is DATA1.

Somewhere around here be dragons:

Partitions on an HDD are each treated like a separate physical disk _for purposes of assigning letters_. But of course you can't physically interchange their positions on the HDD, so Windows will always give the first partition a letter, the next partition the next letter, and so on. (This isn't strictly true, but I won't clutter up with the esoterics.)

So, you could have both the old disk and the new disk on the same system at the same time, and have F: and Z: on the new disk, as long as the old disk uses letters other than F: and Z: for its partitions. If it's Windows, AFAIK it will assign letters based on the physical "slot" each disk is in and the order in which each partition is placed on each disk -- this will always result in different letters for different disks or partitions. I don't know what other OSes do, but I'd bet they also assure that each different disk or partition has a different letter, no matter how they're assigned.

It was all so simple and logical when I didn't try to explain it to someone else.

Well, you most probably have in your house a clean, furnished, wooden desk, and a package of playing cards. If you don't have the desk, the marble floor in the bathroom or kitchen will do it. If you don't have the playing cards, a credit/debit bank card will do it, but for that you must bent it few microns before (the playing cards are already bent by factory, they are not straight, contrarily to what most people believe).

Pick any playing card from the package and put it face-down on the table. Hit it with a flip (flick?) of your finger in such a way that it is sliding on the face of the table, and dosage your force in such a way that it will move about 30 or 40 cm. Repeat few times.

Turn the card upside down (face-up). Hit is with the same force. Amazing, this time the card will "fly" from the table, or move many meters on your marble floor, seeming like flying, or hovering over the ground.

If your floor (or the surface of the table) is not [U]perfect[/U] straight and shiny, then the card [U]will[/U] indeed fly, eventually making a loop into the air.

This is called in aeronautics "the ground effect", and it happens because the card is not perfectly flat. When faced-up, the margins of the card are few microns "over" the ground. Therefore, when the card slides on the table, air goes under, and the card is moving frictionless on the table, on a microscopic blanket of air.

If the surface of the table is not perfect flat and shiny, if it is scratched or if some impurities goes under the card (think a grain of salt), then this blanket is disturbed, and the card "jumps", like an exploding car.

When we were children, we used to play this trick on another children, we had a piece of oval iron flat, we put it on the desks at the school and we flick it, betting who can flick it further away. The trick was exactly the same, one of us had an older brother who revealed the trick to us, the piece of iron wasn't perfect flat, and if you knew how to place it, it would go much further. When we hand it to the next guy, we turned upside-down, so he could only launch it half of the distance, even if he used all the force of his finger flick.

Your HDD head works exactly the same. There is a small "playing card" which is called "head", and it reads the information from the disks. In case you don't know :razz:

The area of the head is about 1 squared mm, but don't imagine the track is so wide, otherwise your harddisk would only be able to store few couple of bytes. The track is microscopic, there are thousands of tracks per inch, but the head is still 1 squared mm. That is because there is no mechanism to "lift" the head over the surface of the disk, as it was for bigger and older disks. The head is reading the tracks by magnetic influence, same as the head of your tape player, but the HDD head should not stay in contact with the plate of the disc, otherwise the friction between the head and the plate will damage the disk in few days, from both mechanical friction AND electrostatic charging (due to rotation, think Van der Graaf machine). Therefore, the head "hovers" few microns OVER the surface of the disk, and there is no mechanism to control this distance, beside of the "ground effect". It is very difficult to control it mechanically. Therefore, the "huge" area of the head is not used to read the track, but to do the "aeroplaning" (well, think "aquaplaning" that happens to your car on a wet street, it is exactly the same phenomenon, but produced by water, when your tires are not properly maintained). Reading the track, the "active" magnetic part is just very small in the middle, microscopic. The rest is "playing card". One full square millimeter of playing card (huge area, compared to active area, think a playing card with a 5-mm-diameter dot in the middle) it is used to "lift" the head over the surface. Due to very fast rotation of the disks, air goes in between the head and the plate, and "lifts" the heads up. Yes, there are more heads, two for each physical disk, one for each side. You can have from 2 to 14 heads inside, depending on your hdd. That is the mystery why new, small (in physical dimension, not in storage space) disks have a hole somewhere, equipped with an air filter (have you ever opened a HDD? there is a small air filter inside which looks like a miniature pillow) they need to "suck" air from outside to work properly. Contrarily to the belief, they are NOT airtight (as the old, 5 inch or 7 inch HDD used to be).

In their quest to reduce the dimension, to increase the density (more physical disks in the package, therefor increasing the number of faces, but decreasing the space in between), reduce the price, etc, the manufacturers opted for "aero-planing" heads. The disk contains special "landing zones" (think like airports in real life) from where the heads "take off", when the disks start to spin, due to ground effect. Special form of the head (think playing card) and the air filters favor this. Then the head is "hovering", flying, over the surface of the plate, at only few microns distance. This way, there is no friction, and the disk can work for years.

Now, think about the air filter malfunction. This is the most frequent cause of HDD crashing. You will not read too much of this on the internet. People still believe that the HDD is an ermetic (air tight) closed structure, where the air or moisture can't go. That is false. You can google for "hdd air filter". I never saw a hdd malfunction in my life which was not related to air filtering. And I opened and analyzed hundreds in the last 14 years.

From time to time, a particle of dust escape the filtering mechanism, and goes inside. Sooner or later, this particle of dirt gets between the head and the plate, therefore disturbing the air blanket. If the particle is enough big, the head will "crush" it, therefore causing a "scratch" on the surface of the disc. A microscopic scratch.

But this is not necessary. The particle may be much smaller, so it does not touch and does not scratch the surface of the disk, it does not touch the head either, it just "fly" between the head and the surface.

Well, bad news! This is enough to cause a small vibration on the head, which may eventually transmit to the head above (the opposite face of the other physical disk, which has its own head, the heads are coupled together, as a comb that goes between the plates, each finger of the comb has heads on both sides, to read both plates, you can google for disk images). The small vibration will cause the other head to "hit" the disk, (its own disk) causing a small scratch on that disk.

Next pass of the head over the scratch, and the heads hits the scratch, causing a vibration, therefore hitting the disk again, in different place (because the disks rotate in this time).

Some British lord, I forgot his name, had a funny law about how your boots get dirty, and how you all get dirty, when you go hunting. One small piece of soil spill on one of your boots, then you walk and the boots touch each other, therefore the other boot will have some dirt, then the boots touch again and now you have four spots, and after a while, all your hunting trousers are dirty on the inner side, you have a "mersenne number" of dirt spots on your legs, your hands, your face, etc.

This happens with the harddisks too. First you have a small scratch. Some bytes lost because the head vibrates every time it hits the scratch, and during vibrations the magnetic field varies (as distance to the magnetic plate varies) and it can not de-cypher the encoded information anymore.

Hitting the scratch causes the "clink" you hear. This also damages the head a bit, and in turn, the "landing zones" are damaged. Imagine a B77 landing with a broken wheel, the track of the airport may not take that very well... It may take days, hours, or years till all the disk is completely damaged, as the heads can't "take off" anymore. But when it happen, it happen fast, the damaging speed is exponential, and you can do nothing about it.

The best is to [B][U]back-up every important bit of information, as soon as you can, and as fast as you can[/U][/B]. If you have no money to replace the disk, then do it on the web. Lots of providers, amazon or google included, offer now enough GB storage for free. Put everything on encrypted zips, and find some cloud where to drop them. FAST! Don't wait till you have a new hdd. And don't ask me how I know! [SUP](TM)[/SUP] :razz:

As your data is obviously very important to you, when replacing the disk can you use a RAID array, to make future problems that bit easier to sort out?

Consider cooling your new disk if it is going to be heavily used.

@ LaurV- Great explanation! Thanks!

@ The Mawn- If you encounter difficulties with your data, post about it. There are recovery possibilities. Some techniques are quite surprising, but have worked for me on a disk and data I had given up for lost.

Alright. Thanks for the information people.

As of right now, the disk is still working fine. I've topped off the backup I already had of the users partition. I won't be able to move the SSD image anywhere since it's too big but that will only be a problem if the SSD and HDD fail at the same time.

I don't think I'll bother with a RAID array. I'm looking at saving myself the expense of a single hard drive if this was in fact a one-and-done random hardware malfunction, so I doubt that I'll look into a RAID array.


Cheesehead: Thanks for the partitions explanation. I'll try renaming the partitions to F: and Z: and see if that works. If I have to, I'll re-move all the users folders etc to that drive.

[QUOTE=TheMawn;355248]Alright. Thanks for the information people.

As of right now, the disk is still working fine. I've topped off the backup I already had of the users partition. I won't be able to move the SSD image anywhere since it's too big but that will only be a problem if the SSD and HDD fail at the same time.

I don't think I'll bother with a RAID array. I'm looking at saving myself the expense of a single hard drive if this was in fact a one-and-done random hardware malfunction, so I doubt that I'll look into a RAID array.
[/QUOTE]

It's just handy if you have if you have one drive fail, you can replace it without much hassle. That's all. RAID has saved me from restoring twice already.

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;355267]RAID has saved me from restoring twice already.[/QUOTE]

Completely agree.

I personally only order enterprise class "kit" with at least four "hot-swap" hard-drives, and configure them all in a RAID6 configuration.

It is always entertaining to suddenly bring two of the drives off-line unexpectedly, and demonstrate that the system continues to work....

So do you mean keep the current drive and get the new one and put THEM in raid or are you talking about getting two brand new ones to put in raid?

I actually think I'll put the old one with a new one in RAID right off the bat, and if the old one goes, I won't bother replacing it. I'll get the satisfaction of only tossing the drive it is in fact dead, the reassurance of having no future issues if it does happen to die, and some extra read performance while the array holds.

Nearly 24 hours and the drive continues to operate fine except for the one little mishap.

[QUOTE=chalsall;355268]Completely agree.

I personally only order enterprise class "kit" with at least four "hot-swap" hard-drives, and configure them all in a RAID6 configuration.

It is always entertaining to suddenly bring two of the drives off-line unexpectedly, and demonstrate that the system continues to work....[/QUOTE]

Me too — I had a failing HDD a month ago, and as it was one of a pair of RAID mirrors, I just put in the new one and the rebuild started automatically.

[QUOTE=TheMawn;355277]Nearly 24 hours and the drive continues to operate fine except for the one little mishap.[/QUOTE]

Trust it about as far as you can throw it. (Read: not very far at all.)

Indeed. Such an incident falls in the "fair warning" classification. As with lending money to strangers or family, don't put anything on it which you can't afford to loose.

[QUOTE=kladner;355294]Indeed. Such an incident falls in the "fair warning" classification. As with lending money to strangers or family, don't put anything on it which you can't afford to loose.[/QUOTE]

Well my problem is I can probably afford to lose the drive and get a new drive and move files over from my backup. Still I'd rather stay away from the hassle.

Does anyone have a yea or nay on setting up a Raid array with my questionably reliable drive, i.e. use a new one and the "broken" one in an array that won't melt down if the "broken" one bites the dust?

[QUOTE=TheMawn;355307]Well my problem is I can probably afford to lose the drive and get a new drive and move files over from my backup. Still I'd rather stay away from the hassle.

Does anyone have a yea or nay on setting up a Raid array with my questionably reliable drive, i.e. use a new one and the "broken" one in an array that won't melt down if the "broken" one bites the dust?[/QUOTE]

Any RAID level other than 0 will tolerate at least one drive failing. You can do it. It's better than nothing. With two drives you can do RAID 1, or mirrored drives.

One week still going strong.

I have the new drive in now. I've got my G: and Y: Partitions instead of F: and Z:

For some reason, my E: drive and the drive with my F: and Z: are both in my "Safely Remove Hardware" thingy (though the new one is not) so I've been able to determine which drive is which. I'll change the old letters to H and X or something, dismount it, and change the new letters to F and Z, and re-mount the drive. Then I'll reboot and see if the changes all stick and that all the dependencies are still intact.

Success!

With the exception of one minor OMAGAD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO WHY ME????????? moment the transfer went perfectly.

I had F: users and Z: OS image on the old drive.
I set up G: Users and Y: OS image on the new drive, and copied everything over (I just made a new image of my OS on the new drive instead of copying it since I was overdue anyway)

I swapped Z: to X:, and then Y: to Z: and that went very smoothly.

In swapping G: to H:, the computer told me that because the drive was still in use (in retrospect, that would be dropbox.exe and probably nothing else) I [I]COULD[/I] rename the path but F: would still be used to access the drive (I didn't know you could have two drive letters for the same partition) until I rebooted which is when F: would be released. It said I could not assign F: to something until I rebooted which would allow Windows to formally release the letter once the drive was no longer being used.

Unfortunately, after rebooting, F: was unavailable as a drive letter. I plugged in a USB stick and sure enough, it was given F:. I shut down and unplugged all the USB dongles from my motherboard, turned everything back on and F: was freed up. Swapped G: to F: and rebooted and everything was great. Dropbox immediately stopped complaining about having lost its folder.


I must say I am very impressed with Windows' ability to completely lose a drive and have everything come back up without a care in the world. You'd think having a bunch of links broken would be a problem but I find it ingenious (while also intuitive) to keep retrying the links and trust the user to either change the links manually or fix the drive and let's all continue on our merry ways.


I am now left with a 1TB drive that I don't know how to use. This is the one that did get the click-of-death but I am seriously considering that nothing is permanently wrong with it. I won't put anything important or unique on it. I was thinking of using it for more backups purposes.


I had considered setting up a RAID array (Raid 1 of course since I will never [I]fully[/I] trust the drive) but a bit of research showed that it would be a bit of a mess to set up. What I did not know is you cannot set up a mirrored array with an existing drive without formatting it (losing everything in the process). I did have everything externally backed up so I could have done that but I hadn't made the full distinction between a "backup" and "RAID". Since I would have absolutely no intention to rebuild the array should it fail, I figured RAID was more of a why-the-hell-not idea than an actually-good-idea.

Another slightly related thought:

I think the management of multiple drives is something that should be left to probably the upper (I hesitate to use "smarter") 20% or even 10% of computer users because of the complications a person can begin to incur.

The way I've moved most of my users folder (some of the stuff like settings and the like can't be moved from the OS drive, and for VERY good reason) would confuse an awful lot of people, which is a problem since I do have a mother and worse yet, a father who is to (Mom what Mom is to me, when it comes to computers) who occasionally use the computer for whatever. It's important for their sake then that the relocation of the music and documents and pictures etc. folders be as invisible as possible. Luckily, Windows does allow you to manually move special folders, and a few well-placed shortcuts can deal with anything Windows misses.

When I explained to my mother that I had moved her pictures to a different hard drive altogether, she said she was quite surprised she hadn't even noticed, which was sort of the point. Of course, the flip side of this is for someone who doesn't know (mainly because they don't NEED to know) if the users hard drive did fail, they would have suddenly lost all their pictures but nothing else.

If a lady walks up to you and says she lost all her pictures but everything else on her computer is still fine, you would probably think she deleted them by accident or something, since the hard drive itself is still perfectly healthy. I seriously doubt you would ask about any hard drives having had the users folder on [I]it[/I] which may have died. Truly, I think it would be unlikely to come up even if someone discovered the dead hard drive in the case, that nobody ever even knew about.

I built a computer for a friend last Christmas (just before building my own) and I helped him pick out the parts. I had talked with someone else about their thoughts on the parts list, and they did initially inquire about possibly having an SSD and an HDD in tandem, but we both eventually agreed that my friend probably isn't "mentally equipped" to deal with multiple drives, and probably doesn't care enough to learn to judge what goes on an SSD and what goes on an HDD.

One of my mother's friends saw my computer and noted how massive she thought it was (the HAF 932 is a big case even by full-tower standards and hers was on the smaller end of the mid-tower spectrum) and said, I kid you not: "Wow, that must have a lot of gigabytes in it!"


Intel's more recent chipsets have a feature which uses up to 64GB of SSD space (it'll go up as SSD's become more mainstream and capacities go up; 64GB is probably somewhat experimental for now) as a cache for the most commonly accessed files from the main HDD.

I think it's funny because they are appealing to a [B]huge[/B] market (a lot of people are like my friend and my mom's friend) that doesn't have the knowledge or judgement to try to manage an SSD and HDD, but that market also lacks the knowledge to even understand what the service is. As far as they're concerned, it's "I plug this ess-ess-dee thing in and my computer gets faster!"

[QUOTE=TheMawn;356020]

I am now left with a 1TB drive that I don't know how to use. This is the one that did get the click-of-death but I am seriously considering that nothing is permanently wrong with it. I won't put anything important or unique on it. I was thinking of using it for more backups purposes.

[/QUOTE][i]You think backups are not important or unique????[/i]

Movies. Music. Etc. I have 6 harddisks with movies, for a total of 4TB, and another 3 (total 1T5) with music. It may look a lot, but in this part of the world we don't make big deal about that C letter between parenthesis (long live the torrents!), and Western Digital Passports are produced locally - they are the cheapest way for storage since few years, one 500G was under THB2000 (about USD60) and since USB3.0, attached to larger bags like 1TB, 2TB (or more) came to the shelves, the 500G (and old 1T with USB2.0) are getting cheaper day by day (currently around $45, or cheaper if you need the HDD only, no "external enclosure"). There was a time the supermarkets gave away old "passports" if you buy photo paper or this kind of stuff (no joke).

For comparison, one DVD (4G7, normal, DVDR+ or whatever) is about 10 baht, you would spend about THB2100 to buy "1T worth of space" in DVDs, the CD's are 2-3 baht (if you buy 100), but can only store 700M (still good for listening to music in my car). And you can write them only once, they are generally slow and difficult to carry around. R/W stuff is expensive (and even slower) and bluerays are too new (therefore not easy to find except in malls and supermarkets where the price is higher) therefore not portable (most computers don't have a reader).

Flash memories are still more expensive, compared with HDD, you can buy an 8G for 200 baht or 32G for 600, their only merit is that they are portable and small.

There are many years since you can have 1G of storage for about 3-4 baht, in CD's and DVD's, and people still preferred HDD and Flash cards, as they were smaller and more portable.

But since the SSD hit the public, even the prices of USB3.0 pocket HDDs dropped a lot. Cheap storage, fast access, portability? Nothing beats a HDD. Now, under 2 baht per gig.

Have one Hdd which is not very "trustable"? The first thing coming into mind is "movies". Those things take lots of space, and there is no big deal if some of them is lost, you just play microtorrents again...

Well, now don't ask me what kinda movies and music I have, you might be totally disappointed, hehe. (I am too, sometimes).