HD Crash on Production PC.

[Analog-X64]

Well this is something that has been happening to often lately.

The Data drive on my Music/Graphics production PC has crashed and 6 months worth of work is lost, that includes the Music Video I was working on.

The Quality/Reliability of hard drives have gone down since 2004, this is my 5th hard drive failure, a couple on my wifes PC and the others on various other PC's.

I built my Production PC with 2 Hard drives.. a smaller 80GB for Windows and software install since this will take the most abuse. the 2nd Drive the larger 250GB is the Data drive only used to store content, which is like a backup drive. The PC itself is attached to an APC UPS Unit, so no power surge problems there.

Apparently all my precautions were not good enough.

I just purchased 2 x 500GB drives and I'll be re-building my PC using Raid 1 Hardware. Hopefully this will be enough redundancy for the next crash.

[k_rostoen]

That sucks. Been using Seagate Barracudas for as long as I can remember and never had any problems with them. Got a Maxtor for free, and after a year or so... *crash*

It really can't get any worse than a harddrive crash. That would in case have to be that the house burnt down at the same time.

[Analog-X64]

I've had Maxtors, Segates and Western Digitals fail on me. I think the quality of consumer level Hard drives have gone downhill since 2004. Capacity and Speed has increased, but these things are not on the market long enough to get good feedback on reliability.

I'd have to move up to Server Level hard drives to see good results, but unfortunately those drives are pricier.

I'm hoping at least withe a Raid 1 setup, if one drive fails the other will take over and I can replace the failed one without or minimal data loss.

Now I have to go through pain of finding all my install CD's and VST's, and start my 3D Render project from scratch...bah!!

[Instant Remedy]

Our family/surfing-computer is in a semi-closed space and several drives on this computer have started to malfunction but only with partial data loss, no serious totally dead drives. They started to sound wierd and windows gave warnings. The heat is probably causing problems to the drives. Both were IBM-drives. My music/game computer never had any problems but it is standing on the floor in my basement which is a lot cooler. I agree with you to some degree that drives have been dropping in quality, my first drives (before 2002) never had any issues.

Not backing up work in progress for 6 months is a little optimistic especially since you've had crashes before The Raid 1 solution is probably the way to go, hope things will work out as smoothly as possible.

[k_rostoen]

Raid is probably the way to go, yes. And of course you could also make a cheap backup solution. Seems like most external harddrives (at least the three ones I got) comes with one-click backup software. These drives cost appx. nothing these days.

[Vosla]

With all that genuine stuff that you are pumping out, I would suggest you to spread your data across several backup solutions. Raids for keeping your working enviroment, external HDDs for fast backups, DVDs for casual collections and transfering them back & forth.

I lost a lot of data but had it all backed up in some ways, so after some days digging for the right backups, I was able to recreate almost all. Bad luck if you were shot down inmidst the creation of stuff but hey - it's computers...

"Tand, Tand, Tand ist Werk von Menschenhand"

[Analog-X64]

I have bits and pieces backuped up here and t here, but not the full 250GB drive.

Honestly I've never had a drive fail in 6 months, and there are always warning signs before fails, which gives me ample time to buy a new one, and clone the drive before total failure.

Typical signs are, very sluggish performance and a lot of un-usual clicking signs from the drive, which is referred to as the "Click of Death"

I had neither of these warning signs, and the ironic thing about it is.. last month I purchased a 500GB Portable drive so I can backup my Graphic/Music production data onto it.