I see dead drives

milorad wrote in post #6453786
something worth mentioning I think, is that electronic equipment experiences both electrical and heat stress when powered on. That stress can be compared with a sack full of power-on hours. Certainly the balance is delicate between switching things on and off a couple of times a week to do backups, and leaving the damned thing on all the time.

The most likely time for a drive to fail will be at power-on time. That doesn't mean it won't fail anyway, just that leaving it off for two days, doesn't necessarily work in it's favour on day 3.

I've always thought the same thing. Generally speaking I'd rather leave a drive on all the time than regularly turn it off and on. If I turn it on once a month though for less than a days time I feel pretty comfortable that it has a decent chance of lasting a long time unless it gets mishandled, or is predisposed to early failure.

I could be wrong though, which is why I keep extra backups on extra hard drives

jdouglas003 wrote in post #6448205
My day job is DAM manager for a large cosmetics company in the Dallas area.

Part of the job consists of backing up/archiving all of the RAW images from all of the photo shoots for publications and web.

Since there are sooo many RAW images from each shoot we are currently just backing them up to duplicate firewire drives.

In the past two years I have a total of four 1- terabye drives just stop working.

So if you are backing all of your files up to just one drive, please beware, they do fail.

how many DID NOT stop working ?

ed rader

For each internal drive I have I have 2 backup drives. One is at home doing incremental backups and the other stays at work. I swap them out every Friday. I also burn digital negatives to DVD's for archival purposes. I just lost a drive the other day and since I had a second, just kept plugging away.

I got bit 3 times in 1 month

#1 lost 6 months of work due to knocking a external drive over
#2 Spent a month getting a Sony AIT tape drive to read a tape with 2 yrs of work
#3 lighting stike which took out 1 switch, 1 adsl router and 2 pcs.

Boy have I learnt a lot

Wilt wrote in post #6453706
Sounds like we need to investigate directly with harddrive manufacturers, to determine if ANY lubricant is used at all, at the center hub, to see if it is merely urban legend among archivists!

I've cut up literally hundreds of drives, and there is a light grease type lubricant in there.
However I can't imagine it drying out, from lack of use.
If it was going to dry out, it seems just as likely to happen if the drive was being used.

Moppie wrote in post #6455799
I've cut up literally hundreds of drives, and there is a light grease type lubricant in there.
However I can't imagine it drying out, from lack of use.
If it was going to dry out, it seems just as likely to happen if the drive was being used.

yeah, I agree about the non-use vs. usage, and lifetime of the grease. Especially if a modern silicon grease is used, rather than an old type petroleum derivative.

Wilt wrote in post #6455829
yeah, I agree about the non-use vs. usage, and lifetime of the grease. Especially if a modern silicon grease is used, rather than an old type petroleum derivative.

All the drives I cut up had a white grease, which from my experiance is usualy silicon based.
I have a couple dead ones at home too, I'll try and open them up if I can find a torx driver that will fit.

Moppie wrote in post #6455846
All the drives I cut up had a white grease, which from my experiance is usualy silicon based.
I have a couple dead ones at home too, I'll try and open them up if I can find a torx driver that will fit.

Ive got a set of tools that will open them. Dick Smith is your friend.

I've been in the computer industry for many years now and Digital Photography for about 5 years or so. I've dealt with hard drives failures many times and know that you can't depend on a single drive ever! I've had a new Seagate drive die on me within days of putting in to service.

As for backup solutions this my friends is really the holy grail of computing these days. As mentioned hard drive capacities are growing so quickly. Seriously I just bought my first 1.5TB Drive on Friday!!! At the same time none of the "Backup Solutions" are anywhere near these capacities.

Over the years I've tried many backup solutions and found that CD's and DVD's just aren't reliable but do offer a good online solution if need be. I have never had any luck with tape no matter how many solutions I've tried. I admit that I've never tried any enterprise level solutions and probably never will since this is only for personal use.

With that said I keep all of my Digital Content (Audio / Video / Photo) on two different RAID 5 Servers that I built (see below). Each of them are expandable to about 20TB using new 1.5TB drives. For extra piece of mind I also use an online backup company (Cabonite) for all of my Documents and Photos.

What's the cases and drive enclosures?

Faolan wrote in post #6461149
What's the cases and drive enclosures?

The Case is an AeroCool Masstige
The SATA Enclosures are 3 - Super Micro CSE-M35T-1B (for the black ones)

If you built something like this make sure you have a big enough power supply to handle all of the drives. The other way around it is to make sure the RAID Controller supports Staggered Spin Up. I am using a 3Ware 9550 which does.

What is the best raid to have?

Raid 5 will allow you to withstand a single drive failure. Raid 6 will allow you to withstand two drive failures without any data loss.

There are many variations of RAID but these are the most common. I personally use RAID 5 but as the drives get larger I am considering going to RAID 6. If you happen to have another drive fail when you are rebuilding a RAID 5 you are out of luck.

what is minimum # of drives for 5 and 6?

zeva wrote in post #6462684
what is minimum # of drives for 5 and 6?

3 Drives for RAID 5 and 4 Drives for RAID 6

In RAID 5 you have one Parity Drive and in RAID 6 you have to.

So the capacity will be Total of drives minus one for RAID 5 and Total drives minus 2 for RAID 6.