And another HDD died!!!

[Demon Cleaner]

I really have no luck, this evening another HDD of mine died, the external Maxtor One Touch drive. I stored all my Pleasuredome backups on it, which is very annoying, as it were nearly 250GB. I only have backups of a few of the files, which is even more annoying.

It happened when joining the Visual PinMAME Tables for updating to the latest version, it began to check the files and suddenly stopped at 79%, freezing uTorrent. From that moment on, I was unable to access the disk.

I use to download the torrents to an SATA internal disk, then keep a backup of it on the Maxtor. But I only have files on the SATA which are more often changed like the MAME files, and kept the other stuff only on the Maxtor due to space.

Files on the disk were:

- MAME CHDs (backup)
- MAME ROMs (backup)
- MAME Extras (backup)
- Future Pinball Tables
- Visual Pinball Tables
- Visual PinMAME Tables
- Laserdiscs
- PASSIGAR
- MESS BIOS files (backup)
- DosCollection
- Capcom and SNK Artwork
- HazeMD

There can be more, I don't know, I cannot access the disk anymore, when I switch it on, it beeps for 30 seconds, then stops.

Now I'll try to get some files back, I have some minor luck as most of these torrents are free, only cost me time to download them again.

Then I'm gonna send the disk back to Maxtor, as I already did some month ago with an internal disk of them, hope they will replace it. Only thing I'm worrying about, shall I ask them if they can restore my files? I don't know because it are only "illegal" files on it. What do you think?

[Harrison]

Sorry to hear of the HD problems. How long have you had the drive? Didn't you also have an internal Maxtor drive fail a while ago too?

Normally companies will not offer to restore the data if they find a drive to be the fault. Instead they will normally just send you a replacement drive and scrap the old one.

[Puni/Void]

Sorry to hear about your HD troubles, Demon. Hope you will get a new drive that works properly. HD crashes are one of the most annoying things one can experience.

[Demon Cleaner]

How long have you had the drive? Didn't you also have an internal Maxtor drive fail a while ago too?

Almost 6 month, and yes, I had an internal SATA Maxtor which turned out to malfunction (but only after I had copied all my stuff to it ), so I sent it back and got it replaced. Don't know if I'm gonna send it back to Maxtor or to my reseller though. As there is still warranty on it and I have the original box, I'm gonna send it to the reseller, or call them first.

And now, after the 2nd crash, and again a loss of data, I'm really considering in buying a RAID5 controller based storage array system whatever it will cost me. I think of buying a case with a RAID5 controller card and 4 big HDs.

[Submeg]

Yea I dont think you would want to lose it all again

[AlexJ]

HDD failures are the worst - you can replace almost any other part of the PC without any difference, but with a HDD the data's lost forever. I've been quite lucky in that I've only had 2 failures so far, both happened to be Maxtor drives. Touch wood, I haven't had any failures with my Seagates so far (been using them exclusively since about 5 years ago) and I'd recommened the brand to anyone who's looking for a new HDD. I know Maxtor and Seagate are both owned by the same company, but it seems like they take more care over the Seagates than the Maxtors.

[Harrison]

Do you really need Raid 5? Raid 1 would surely do? Also most SATA motherboard controllers have Raid 1 support built in these days.

Or just take a day and back everything up to DVD-R as I do.

[Demon Cleaner]

Or just take a day and back everything up to DVD-R as I do.

That's not possible with files that you update regularly, as it were only files from Pleasuredome.

Do you really need Raid 5? Raid 1 would surely do?

In Raid1 mode you lose 1/2 of your space, whereas in Raid5 mode you only lose 1/4.

[Harrison]

Or 1/3 as you can run a Raid 5 with 3 disks minimum.

I do agree that Raid 5 is a much better solution to data lose prevention, as in Raid 1 you are just getting a basic mirror of one HD to the other so you have an identical mirrored backup of the data at all times, which means that if sone of the disks failed you have to rebuild the while raid set.

Whereas with Raid 5 the disks use block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks so when a disk fails it still goes on working, reconstructing the lost HDs data from the other drives seemlessly and when you swap out the dead drive for a new one it just rebuilds the data.

Raid 5 does however have two flaws. First it doesn't handle small files well. When you make a write to the Raid 5 array it has to read and write a whole parity block (stripe) from the set, so if a parity block is larger than the file being written it has to write the whole block each time, not just the file size. So in your case, if you are copying a lot of very small TOSEC set files it will really hit the performance as it will need to write a whole parity block for each file.

The other flaw is actually data loss. In normal operation the seemless reconstruction of data is brilliant, but where there is a single parity block per stripe (the extra disk), the failure of a second drive in a set results in total data loss. Obviously the likelihood of the failure of two drives at once is very low unless the Raid 5 set contains a large number of disks in the set.

[Submeg]

Hey DC cool sig! How did you do that?