Troublesome Drive...Not Dead

[Michael West]

I drive I had assumed to have bought the farm after  power outages nearly  a year ago...is alive.

the disk disappeared from my desktop....the tiny blue...  power light...refused to light   I assumed the drive had bought the farm.

i I had. after the power failure ..removed the usb cable...assuming the drive was gone..and hd plnned on boxing up the old drive...

Id always thought that when power indicators did "not light up " that  piece of equipment had no power


this afternoon  i re established the connection with the same cable.. 



Voila | the power light returnedand so did a few thousand photographs .

a wonderful way to start  new year

 

[MDL_SD]

Congratulations on your New Year's present.  I would suggest that you copy the files from the resurected drive to a drive that you know is sound/newer.  In my experience when drives start to have "issues" they only get worse and obviously can ultimately fail completely.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Congratulations! And please do heed MDL_SD's advice.

[PeterAit]

Yes, no reason to keep a flaky disk when you can get a 2 TB disk for $60. I just bought 4 of these to upgrade my backup scheme.

[kers]

At the moment you have a new harddisk it is a good thing to do some testing before you are going to use it.
A program like Softraid ( mac) writes and reads the entire disk 3 times and does some searches. This process takes sometimes more than a day to complete.
As you can imagine the HD-manufacturer has no time/money to do such a test before shipping. I already had to replace some faulty new disks.

[BobShaw]

The only thing you can assume with hard disks is that at some stage they will fail. A rugged backup system is essential.

I have some disks that do strange things. Some are as simple as the power connector is flaky or the the USB is flaky. Pull it out and put it back and it is fine. It may just be a dirty connector.
I have a 3TB drive that will not work in my Drobo. I pull it out, put it in a housing and format it in different file systems and test it and it passes every test. Put it back in the Drobo and it immediately fails.

[Eric Brody]

I agree with the rest of the advice here. Drives, even large ones are relatively inexpensive these days. It certainly is a good idea to test them before putting them to critical use. When I set up my 24TB RAID with SoftRAID, I took each of the three 12TB drives and ran them through SoftRAID's test. It took a WEEK for each one! However, it's now done and I can feel reasonably secure (for now). The single most important thing though, of course, it having an effective backup system. With effective backup, it really doesn't matter if a drive fails. It's annoying, costs money, and more importantly expends time, but if properly set up, no data will be lost. DATA is all that matters; redundancy is the solution. All drives will fail, some sooner, some later. I had one fail in a year, and I've got some that are 15 years old and still running (in non-critical areas). There are two kinds of people, those who back up and those who will lose data. Be the former, not the latter.