PP Mguire
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I simply look at it as paranoia like with SSDs in the early days.
Stupid question...... are larger drives reliable?(4TB, 5TB, 6TB)
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When a drive failure with out previous warnings happens to you, I'd bet real money you'll be changing your tune. And you can not deny it DOES happen.
If you continue to have this blind faith, it will at some point in time bite you on the ***. Even NASA doesn't put your blind faith in their space craft and probes. They use redundant computers and flash memory. So having a redundant backup system in place for personal and/or professional use makes prefect sense.
If you continue to have this blind faith, it will at some point in time bite you on the ***. Even NASA doesn't put your blind faith in their space craft and probes. They use redundant computers and flash memory. So having a redundant backup system in place for personal and/or professional use makes prefect sense.
PP Mguire
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Have you not read what I've posted? I've had plenty of drives fail on me for the past 12 years. Mostly all WD as well, but even when I worked with my dad making 40 bucks a weekend I had a 500GB SATA Maxtor fail on me. I couldn't afford to replace such a large drive (at the time) and I was on 56k dial up. So it's not like I could download everything again. I don't have "blind faith", I use common sense. I don't keep critical info on media that keeps power to it.
I have 15TB in my server right now with a shut down hot swappable 1TB for things that can't be replaced, game saves/replays I want to keep, and other odds and ends that were really hard to find on the net and probably can't be reacquired. I then have the super critical photos and videos on an online backup that I've had since 2003, and a duplication of that on a flash drive. As I said before my 6TB drive is almost full. Even with a fiber connection, that's a LOT to redownload. It's not so much ISOs, but all the little odds and ends I have for each game. Folder for almost each individual game full of mods (Skyrim over 30GB alone), instructions for installation I typed up myself, patches for the games I've played for others to easily get, games that don't exist digitally anymore, even stuff for consoles (just use your imagination). If that drive failed, that would seriously suck but guess what...it's not the end of the world. My ex killed a 3TB drive filled (300MB left) with media. I was mad but only at her for continuously hitting the table my server was on with a chair. Other than that, still not the end of the world.
That's been my point the whole time. Not blindly putting faith in drives, but saying if the data is seriously that critical you should have some form of real backup. Not rely on RAID either unless you want the performance benefits of 5/6 and the convenience of a parity drive as well as multi-drive usage while having the cash for it. On the flip side, a good drive will last a seriously long time even in a 24/7 environment. My first 1TB drive is still going after 6 years of constant usage. Even the little 3GB Maxtor which was my first "big" upgrade runs after all the thrashing and abuse it got. If something noncritical goes down, it's not the end of the world.
C0RR0SIVE
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I think the difference between PP and everyone else is this - PP doesn't care if the data gets wiped by a dead drive, he can just re-obtain all his data, and none of it is truly important to him. Where as the rest of us with these drives could be in a situation where re-downloading it isn't feasible (try downloading 12TB of data on satellite, it's not cheap!) due to either costs, or extensive time.
The reason I am so keen on having a RAID array, PLUS an actual backup disk (cold storage more or less) is the fact about 3 or 4 months ago, a drive of mine decided to go kaput, and took several terabytes of multimedia with it, took me over a MONTH to redownload that (gotta love having connections with your ISP for temporary unlimited data), and a lot of it is because I had to 1, remember everything I had, 2, I had to find it and get it going, and 3, some that stuff was virtually impossible to get the first go-around.
In the end, it's always going to be a different situation, everyone has different budgets, and everyone has different reasons for how they store data.
Like me, I prefer 4x4TB disks in Raid5 + 2 hotspares + a cold storage disk or three. But, that's because a LOT of this, is stuff I love, as does friends and family when they are over, and I can't really afford it to just vanish because of a drive going bad (or RAID controller!) on me.
Where as PP sees no real value in the massive amounts of data, he still has a backup solution for what's important to him.
Here's some food for thought though... I have 2x 1TB greens, one is 3 years old, only has a few hundred hours on it - shes DEAD, died from bad sectors, the second one, is one of the very first 1TB greens that hit the market, not a single bad sector, still works great to this day, just slow due to low cache and a limited logic board on it (plus older platter tech). So drive reliability depends on manufacturing + consumer care of product + how heavily the disk is accessed.
Generally, what I do is the following...
Buy new 4TB+ drive
Run 1 week of read/write tests to the disk to ensure no data corruption is occuring (can take a LONG time to write and read back just one time)
Put drive onto rubber isolaters in case
Ensure I have high pressure, high CFM fans on drive cages with rubber grommets to reduce vibrations as much as humanly possible.
This has seriously helped me keep a few drives that are known to have a semi-high failure rate, last longer than expected. To this day, none of my disks get to 40C, they almost never get above 35C, but I am also moving about 150CFM over every 4 disks of mine in a semi-cool closet.
The reason I am so keen on having a RAID array, PLUS an actual backup disk (cold storage more or less) is the fact about 3 or 4 months ago, a drive of mine decided to go kaput, and took several terabytes of multimedia with it, took me over a MONTH to redownload that (gotta love having connections with your ISP for temporary unlimited data), and a lot of it is because I had to 1, remember everything I had, 2, I had to find it and get it going, and 3, some that stuff was virtually impossible to get the first go-around.
In the end, it's always going to be a different situation, everyone has different budgets, and everyone has different reasons for how they store data.
Like me, I prefer 4x4TB disks in Raid5 + 2 hotspares + a cold storage disk or three. But, that's because a LOT of this, is stuff I love, as does friends and family when they are over, and I can't really afford it to just vanish because of a drive going bad (or RAID controller!) on me.
Where as PP sees no real value in the massive amounts of data, he still has a backup solution for what's important to him.
Here's some food for thought though... I have 2x 1TB greens, one is 3 years old, only has a few hundred hours on it - shes DEAD, died from bad sectors, the second one, is one of the very first 1TB greens that hit the market, not a single bad sector, still works great to this day, just slow due to low cache and a limited logic board on it (plus older platter tech). So drive reliability depends on manufacturing + consumer care of product + how heavily the disk is accessed.
Generally, what I do is the following...
Buy new 4TB+ drive
Run 1 week of read/write tests to the disk to ensure no data corruption is occuring (can take a LONG time to write and read back just one time)
Put drive onto rubber isolaters in case
Ensure I have high pressure, high CFM fans on drive cages with rubber grommets to reduce vibrations as much as humanly possible.
This has seriously helped me keep a few drives that are known to have a semi-high failure rate, last longer than expected. To this day, none of my disks get to 40C, they almost never get above 35C, but I am also moving about 150CFM over every 4 disks of mine in a semi-cool closet.
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Yeah, this thread with PP and others became about personal opinion rather than a debate just on redundancy.. In peoples personal life, a RAID or a backup wont matter to one person, but will to others, like myself, I need all my data and I have back ups incase I lose a drive.
PP Mguire
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It's not personal at all, it's common sense. You guys just aren't seeing the logic in it at all.
Cor, has a limited connection due to ISP (I know the sat feels, had it for 2 years) so he backs up because it's practically irreplaceable data. You work for a company, yea? Companies require backups, it's that simple. 90% of the people who come on these boards asking about data backup just want to make sure they don't lose their movies they downloaded off the bay. That's replaceable data and not exactly required to have a backup. I'm sorry but I used to be a media hoarder and was buying drives because I didn't want to delete **** or thought a drive might die in 3 or so years so I'd move to a new one. I got over that because really, how many times are you gonna watch 60 movies more than once? It's very unlikely. That's the situation I'm talking about. RAID is not a backup and not even really proper redundancy. If your data is important, you don't rely on RAID to keep that. You do a proper cold backup.
Another point I was trying to drive home was, people are too paranoid about drives dying. A well taken care of good drive will last the better part of a decade 24/7 with tons of access. Most people have drives that die due to vibration from improper case mounting or improper air flow. It's all in how you take care of your ****. For instance, the stupid Backblaze article everybody LOVES to link to diss Seagate drives. Those idiots do not treat their drives right AND buy refurbished drives. Of course they're going to have a lot of dead Seagate drives because they don't last long in high heat, high vibration environments. And refurbished? Come on.
Cor, has a limited connection due to ISP (I know the sat feels, had it for 2 years) so he backs up because it's practically irreplaceable data. You work for a company, yea? Companies require backups, it's that simple. 90% of the people who come on these boards asking about data backup just want to make sure they don't lose their movies they downloaded off the bay. That's replaceable data and not exactly required to have a backup. I'm sorry but I used to be a media hoarder and was buying drives because I didn't want to delete **** or thought a drive might die in 3 or so years so I'd move to a new one. I got over that because really, how many times are you gonna watch 60 movies more than once? It's very unlikely. That's the situation I'm talking about. RAID is not a backup and not even really proper redundancy. If your data is important, you don't rely on RAID to keep that. You do a proper cold backup.
Another point I was trying to drive home was, people are too paranoid about drives dying. A well taken care of good drive will last the better part of a decade 24/7 with tons of access. Most people have drives that die due to vibration from improper case mounting or improper air flow. It's all in how you take care of your ****. For instance, the stupid Backblaze article everybody LOVES to link to diss Seagate drives. Those idiots do not treat their drives right AND buy refurbished drives. Of course they're going to have a lot of dead Seagate drives because they don't last long in high heat, high vibration environments. And refurbished? Come on.
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