Jim Lane

Help!
or
Dang, Geez and other words of frustration.
I lost another hard drive tonight on my computer, this is the 4th one in about 9 months, all of them were Western Digital, 3) internal and 1) external, the 3 internal just mysteriously disappeared and the external started making grinding sounds, by the time I figured out where the noise was coming from, the data was already gone, actually it was probably gone weeks ago.

They were all about 2 to 3 years old.

My computer:
Intel i-7 3.60 ghz
16.0 gb ram
Windows 8.1 professional 64 bit
800-watt power supply
4) 3tb Seagate internal drives
4) Failing Western Digital internal drives.
4) Western Digital external drives failing
1) Buffalo external drive
This computer runs 24/7

Yes I do have most of it backed up but I have also lost my backup drives.

I had made the decision to use only Seagate drives since I have not lost any of these, only Western Digitals in all my years of computers.

These were all in the 1.5 to 3 terabyte range so I lost a lot of data.

I had also lost 3 Western Digital Hard drives in my DVR systems all without warning.

What is a good secure way to backup my data, I have a lot of it, I am very very slowly burning it to DVD's but I have a lot of it, realistic around 4 to 6 terabytes worth.
I have a lot of pictures, jpeg. and mpeg. movie files.

Throughout the years, I have tried various backup schemes, Colorado Tape Drive systems, USB and Fire wire External Drives, both failed when I went to restore from them, also had DAT.

I just built this computer and I will probably install a Raid-1 system on this one and hope for the best. I had a Raid-1 on my XP pro computer; a virus got in and infected all of the mirror drives.

I am pretty sure it is not my system for the lost drives, I have plenty of stable power and the case has good airflow.


What are you using to backup and archive your data?
Does anyone use an NAS or a Home Base Cloud system?

I have thought about Carbonite but I do not really want my data on somebody else’s system or want to pay a monthly fee for it.

I have thought about SSD but they do not have any capacity yet and still they could die in an instant.

How long do you thing the current DVD protocol will last until I will not be able to read one on a new machine?

Have you found any good software to recover data from a failed drive that still spins?

Jim

Adaminak

That sucks! It's pretty uncommon to lose that many drives on the same system. I've been building computers for almost 20 years and I don't think I've lost more than 3 hard drives the entire time. I know you said you have steady power, but is it possible there's a bad wire somewhere in the stream? Sketchy ground to that particular outlet? Kinked or really old power cord? While 800 watts is a fair amount, if you're actually running 8 spinning-platter drives, in additional to system fans, graphics cards and processor draws, you might be taxing the available juice. Just a few things to look at if you haven't already.

As for me, I use a QNAP 239 Pro II+ NAS with two 2TB WD Red Pro drives in RAID 1. I killed a WD Black in this NAS because it couldn't handle the frequent spin-up from idle when the NAS goes into power-save mode. I could change the setting, but the Red Pro is a better solution all around. The biggest problem with a NAS is that if you buy a cheaper one (under $250), you're not going to like the performance if you have to backup 500GB a week, as it'll take most of the week to get it done, even with a direct Gigabit connection. My experience has been that anything less powerful than an Atom processor is useful only as a home storage device to stream camcorder movies and music to the TV and stereos. You could certainly save a lot of aggravation by using a dedicated software solution for finding the changes to your data and backing-up on the new materiel, which will save you a lot of bandwidth and time. Incidentally, if you upgrade to Win 10, the new backup feature covers that for you, and unlike Win7 and prior, it doesn't include a system image by default and only backs-up the user files that are changed. My son uses his laptop for school and does about 1Gb of new work every week and it takes 35 minutes or so to backup the changes on an external USB3 hard drive.

If you want to stick with DVD, I'd suggest you look at Blu-Ray. Disk size is much greater, write speed is much greater, and they actually make a disk designed for archive with a shelf life of 20-odd years.


In any case, good luck!

cougar

I would think about replacing the power supply. Other than a virus, that is the only thing I can think of that would do in that many hard drives in such a short time. I am using a 5 year old HD that use to be in my desk top as an external backup for my lap top. Still running strong.

Harvie

Just ghost the drives and then un plug the ghost, if failure just plug the ghosted drive in and away you go.