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

TheMawn · 2013-10-04, 23:41

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.

Chuck · 2013-10-04, 23:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by chalsall

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....

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.

chalsall · 2013-10-04, 23:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheMawn

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

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

kladner · 2013-10-05, 01:37

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.

TheMawn · 2013-10-05, 03:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by kladner

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.

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?

Mark Rose · 2013-10-05, 04:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheMawn

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?

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.

TheMawn · 2013-10-12, 01:21

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.

TheMawn · 2013-10-12, 02:15

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 COULD 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 fully 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.

TheMawn · 2013-10-12, 02:43

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 it 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 huge 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!"

cheesehead · 2013-10-12, 04:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheMawn

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.

You think backups are not important or unique????

LaurV · 2013-10-12, 06:06

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).

2013-10-12, 02:15	#30
TheMawn May 2013 East. Always East. 11×157 Posts	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 COULD 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 fully 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. Last fiddled with by TheMawn on 2013-10-12 at 02:17 Reason: ca'nt grammer proper

2013-10-12, 02:43	#31
TheMawn May 2013 East. Always East. 6BF₁₆ Posts	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 it 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 huge 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!" Last fiddled with by TheMawn on 2013-10-12 at 02:46 Reason: Too late in the evening for writing, obviously.

2013-10-12, 06:06	#33
LaurV Romulan Interpreter Jun 2011 Thailand 22671₈ Posts	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). Last fiddled with by LaurV on 2013-10-12 at 06:08

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2013-10-04, 23:41	#23
TheMawn May 2013 East. Always East. 11·157 Posts	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.

2013-10-05, 01:37	#26
kladner "Kieren" Jul 2011 In My Own Galaxy! 10158₁₀ Posts	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.

2013-10-12, 01:21	#29
TheMawn May 2013 East. Always East. 6BF₁₆ Posts	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.