poof (geekery)
I also lost basically all of my old music master files, but copies still exist (though not in places they'll be easy to get to).
At least the drive is still under warranty (I don't think I have the receipt, but it has like a 3 year warranty and it's only been manufactured for the last year).
This is the first time a Maxtor drive has totally failed on me. But I was an idiot; it had been giving me fair warning for the last week, but I never got around to buying another drive to replace it.
There needs to be a better way to make backups. Right now the only way to back up a 250GB hard drive is another 250GB hard drive.
A lot of the hard-to-replace stuff would still be on my sister's computer (my old G4 Inkling, which technically she's just "borrowing") but of course that's in San Francisco and I don't think I can walk her through the steps of putting it online for me.
What I really need to get is one of those external LaCie RAID enclosures, or at the very least just get three normal FW enclosures and put a 250GB disk in each one, and do software RAID-5, to get 500GB of reasonably-redundant storage. But I'd been holding off on that until I had a desktop system again, since doing it on a laptop is just kinda retarded. But that just means more Stuff to care about, and I'm trying to limit my Stuff in this life.
Anyway, I'm not too upset about losing the music, honestly, but that's because there's still the hope of recovery. I don't know how I'll feel if the drive fails to come up when it's been sufficiently cooled.
On a related note, does anyone know if there are 5400RPM 250GB drives? I've always preferred to get 5400RPM drives just because they last longer but everyone seems to be all like "OMG u need lots of speeeeeed!" and only sells 7200+RPM drives. Really, why don't manufacturers allow the customer to decide what speed to spin at, or even have the speed change based on usage? Even on a 10KRPM drive it's retarded to have it spinning at 10KRPM constantly. Is a variable-speed motor really that hard to include? I mean, I know that 10 cents is a lot to spend on a rheostat, but...
Anyway, looks like external drives have come down in cost enough that I'll just go to Best Buy and pick up two 300GB externals and then RAID1 them. $600. Eegh.
Comments
Anyway, if you have some cash to burn, and it's reaaaaaaly worth it to you, you can try a data recovery company. I did, and they were unable to help, but the company I chose, their slogan is, "no data, no charge" so you have little to lose. I believe they were called CBL data www.cbltech.com.
As for your question, most of the manufacturers' large hard disks used to come in 5400 RPM models (some exclusively) up to about 300GB, and can still be found but are ridiculously expensive. They have since all switched even the largest drives to 7200 RPM (as you said, they're all "OMG speeeeeeeeeeed!!1"). I can't fathom why someone building a system, when dropping that kind of cash on it, wouldn't simply get a small, fast drive for OS and games and a larger one for storing music, videos, et cetera.
I've been meaning to implement a new storage array pretty much since I rebuilt my system, so maybe this is a hint for me, since all my new and recovered old "important stuff" is still sitting on my RAID-0 stripeset. Western Digital Raptors do come with a 5-year warranty, but still, I don't want to have to cash in on it. Definitely going to put whatever storage drives that I get into a RAID-1 array. No more taking chances.
Well, in any case, good luck with that.
P.S. In my experience as a technician, Maxtor = Crap. Highest failure rate of any drive manufacturer I've seen. Stay away from 'em.
Someone needs to come out with an affordable TB tape backup system or something.
Anyway, I think from now on I'll stick to Western Digital. WD has never given me trouble either.
I don't really care about the audio masters since the only reason I was keeping them around was as a reference for if I ever got around to rerecording songs for foodsexsleep, but at this point I'd rather start over from scratch anyway. The other stuff was just Stuff, and although it's annoying to have lost my free iTMS singles, most of what I lost can just be downloaded again or re-reripped from CD. Also I still have a lot of the mp3 Stuff on my iPod, including a lot of the rarer stuff.
Anyway, if the freezer trick doesn't work (which I won't try until tomorrow night after I've had a chance to buy another drive to copy everything to — tonight Neill, AJ and I are going to see the Homestar Runner show at NYU, crowds permitting) I'll start to think about visiting my sister in San Francisco anyway.
I think my current plan is to buy two WD drives and another firewire enclosure, and just use one as a backup for the other (since doing pure RAID-0 is a pain in the butt for external drives). Then the next time a drive shows signs of failing, I can just shuffle the data from one to the other, then cash in on the warranty. (Which I fully plan on doing with the Maxtor.)
then my smaller drive at home started clicking and i knew it was time to try recovering from it. xcopy did the trick, and within a couple of days it completely failed.
i got concerned about my own music stuff, so before christmas i made cdr's of _everything_ i've recorded... ooh, better do some for the new stuff since then. basically i made rar's of each of the projects. rar is better for compression of audio data than zip. took forever, though.
-bill
When it failed, it only clicked once, though. For the last few days it's been louder than normal, but also this is the first time I've had it on nearly continuously for multiple weeks at a time (usually I only turn it on to archive something or to download music and then sync my iPod).
It's always run pretty hot in the enclosure, so I removed some of the outer casing to give it more potential airflow. I guess that wasn't enough though.
I should look at getting a Firewire drive too, if only for hooking it up and imaging stuff off overnight.
Currently, I have an external firewire that doubles as large data backup and a way to transport music to work.
Anyway. External storage is my only option, what with a laptop being my only computer. This makes RAID unwieldy at best. Yet another reason I need to just get a damn desktop computer again.
Too bad LaCie's off-the-shelf RAID boxes are so expensive ($1500 for 1TB).
Maybe I should look into building a Linux system again, just to act as a soft RAID. Don't want to spend that kind of money right now, though, especially to get something so single-purpose. But I'm not willing to spend $$ on a G5 Tower just yet, not until I have a better idea of my long-term jobness.
I really should have taken care of this issue when the drive started making more noise than usual a week ago. I'm stupid and lazy. Grr.
Also, wtf, the Powermac G5 only has two internal drive bays? Gnr, that means that I'd still need some sort of external enclosure to do a worthwhile RAID.
If you're nearly willing to "pick up two 300GB externals and then RAID1 them. $600. Eegh." then the extra $900 for 3.3x the space isn't so bad...
I wonder if you can add a drive to an existing software RAID... RAID-0, probably, but I don't see how RAID-1 would work, and RAID-5, probably not, though it's conceivable. I know AIX allowed you to do nifty tricks like that though (it didn't use standard RAID mechanisms, but instead had its own logical volume management and used the concept of a 'quorum' to handle the stripe-mirror integrity and so on) but I have no idea about OSX. Though it looks like OSX's soft RAID only supports RAID-1 anyway, so it's fairly academic...
maybe instead I should get the four-bay enclosure, 2x 300GB and RAID-1 them, then later if I need more storage just use the other two bays to set up a second RAID-1 with whatever is the largest available drive at the time.
I wish hardware RAID weren't so goddamn expensive.
There are a few hacks out there, but still pricey. One two three
Also, a review of software vs hardware RAID speeds in MacOS X. Looks slightly dated, but I think it's safe to say that hardware would win big-time.
There seems to be some sort of law that typical hard disks are always about 25 times bigger than the typical backup media. I once had a Mac SE with a 20GB disk and 800k floppies, and now we're up to 100GB drives and 4GB DVD-R's.