Hard Drives Suck. %##@%$^.

[Wolfeman]

Ok just need to vent a little since I have no one else to vent to here at the moment.

So saturday night I was on my Windows PC(my main rig for recording, working, etc. My mac is my internet surfing PC). I noticed it was acting funny when trying to open certain files. It was taking a while to open them, not opening them at all, but then working fine. Sunday afternoon I was working on some recordings of my amp for my website, all was working ok. I then decided to update my audio drivers since a newer version was out. At the end of the installation I restarted my PC, only to find it wouldn't boot into windows. Ok, no big deal, this happens sometimes. Well I spend a good 10 hours today trying to diagnose and fix the issue.

Well it ends up being one of my main system drives that took a dump. Apparently the thingy that moves(the head?) decided to start grinding slightly against the platter, slowly destroying my data, which is why I started having issues then it progressively just destroyed the drive completely. To make matters worse, I can't save any of the good data since I'm a moron and this was a RAID 0 configuration. All is lost.

I had a backup. It was on the same RAID setup. Fuck.

So I've officially lost THOUSANDS of hours worth of work. All my schematics, 3d files for my cabs, logos for my company, pictures, etc, all gone. I can go on and on about what I lost, I would have a list a mile long. Luckily I have a hardcopy of my schematics for my amp designs, but having to redraw everything out on the PC is going to be a pain. This really blows.

What I'm going to do now-
1. Never use Maxtor drives again. Damn thing was only 3 years old. I should have learned after the last time I had one that failed.
2. Never use RAID 0 again. The slight benefit doesn't make up for complete failure.
3. Have a seperate drive strictly for backup purposes. I had planned on doing this a while ago, but completly forgot. I went out and bought a 2TB network drive today so I can have something that automatically backs up my files. I may even sign up for one of those online backup programs as well. Having everything in 3 places seems like a safe way to go.

At least I had all my Slate/EZdrummer files on a separate drive. One less fucking thing to re-download. Oh god, that reminds me, all the plug-ins I had.... I hope I still have all my serial numbers and crap saved in emails. Hell I don't even remember half the stuff I've bought and downloaded. What a pain in the ass.


Burn in hell Maxtor. Thanks for ruining my shit.

 

[paladin shredder]

Other than a family member or friend dying, a hard drive dying has got to be one of the worst things ever.

you should go office space on it.

 

[Wolfeman]

Well it was dissected, so it got what was coming to it. I also threw the identical Maxtor away, even though it was still working. Can't trust it after the other one pissed on me.

 

[Ensi]

Really sucks dude

I'd recommend WD disks, got my 4 year old blue 300gb disk which still runs fine, recently upgraded to a black 1tb, no problems yet

 

[Damian B]

I've worked in a computer repair shop for almost 7 years now. There's very little difference between brands. I've had some Western Digitals last 8 years and some come back bad in a month. Same with Seagate, Maxtor, Fujistu and the rest.

The best advice has already been covered, but to reiterate: always have your critical data backed up, never use RAID 0 for anything important, and never expect that it couldn't happen to you.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

I've had 2 drives go on me. The first sucked so hard I vowed never to go through that again and now everything gets backed up daily. The most recent system one that went down sucked, but I was back up and going in 2 hours with no loss.

 

[John_C]

if you liked the speed of raid 0, look into raid 10 and 01.

Sucks to hear about this, I've had 2 drives fail over the last 3 years and it's always a real annoyance, although i've never lost as much important data as you have!

 

[Steven Otto]

Don't want to sound like an ass, but when you make a back-up of something, store it somewhere not around your computer and definitely not in the same computerdrive.

If I had such important files as you had, I'd put it on an external drive and store it at your home/a friends house somewhere far away from your computer, in case burglers enter your workplace or fire breaks out...just saying.

I feel really sorry for the fuck up of your drive. If something like that happened to me i'd be grumpy for a few months

 

[Wolfeman]

Yeah it's going to take me a while to recover from this fiasco. Right now I have the OS reinstalled and I'm starting to piece back together all the programs I had installed. Still haven't tackled reinstalling SSD. I hate that install/registration process.

I am still royally pissed about loosing all my front/rear panel vector images for my amps. There were very precise measurements on those things that took me days of work to get everything correct. I'm not looking forward to redoing those, but have to if I want to get any more panels made.

Anyone have any recommendations for auto backup software? I just need something to make an automatic back up of my 3 drives once a week, and throw them onto my network drive. Free would be nice, but anything will work.

 

[JayB]

I've had 2 drives go on me. The first sucked so hard I vowed never to go through that again and now everything gets backed up daily. The most recent system one that went down sucked, but I was back up and going in 2 hours with no loss.

this is what i do

 

[Pot]

i´ve been rescued a few times by this prog: Acronis True Image Workstation
just make an image of your partitions or entire drives
i also have 1 external drive where i keep images of the partitions i have on the main pc and recently bought 2tb drive to store the critical stuff...it´s a double security thing

 

[Mago]

damn man sucks to hear that
my main HD decided to fail and fuck off last fall, but with a fuckloud of luck was able to rescue the data.
Since then I reworked my way to backup and won't risk to loose data again...learned to hard way though.
also had a renting thread going on at that time