External Hardrives...Do you trust them?

LiamB

LiamB

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Hi,

So I've had my Seagate 3tb external hdd for around 4 months now, it is my only form of storage for all my pictures and i have about 400gb so far of raw files stored on it.

Well today i have tried to use it, and it runs extremely slow, takes about 10min for my PC to detect it, then when i try and use it, well it's impossible.

I did a checkdsk on it and i get the following sort of errors

The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 17D of name \LiamPics\100D5200\DSC_0009.NEF.
A disk read error occurredc000000e
The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 17E of name \LiamPics\100D5200\DSC_0011.NEF.
A disk read error occurredc000000e
The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 17F of name \LiamPics\100D5200\DSC_0012.NEF.

From what i have read online, this disk is already dying on me, so I've set all my files to copy back to my internal HDD at the moment, but I don't think this will be possible, it goes to around 6mb/s for around 2 seconds then drops down to 0bytes.

Has anyone else had such a short life span from an external hardrive before? If they are so unreliable then what's the point? Feeling rather frustrated at the moment.

Luckily the majority of the pictures on there I don't mind losing as they are just "practice" shots, but there are some, like for example my honeymoon pictures which i would like to keep hold of.

At least It's taught me not to only rely on one disk for storage!
 
Drives fail. Could be after 1 day or 10000 days. It's why their life span is given as an average by the manufacturer.

It's also why you should always have at least two copies of your data on separate drives (raid counts as one copy) at all times.
 
Toshiba "portable" drives developed a bad reputation (I think). You might find external desktop drives may be less reliable compared to drives fitted inside a computer as they are liable to knocks, bad handling before they ever get to your possession etc. I would not trust all my photos or anything else on a single disk. You still need to back up your data.
 
Though can seem over dramatic but:-

"There are two types of hard drives ~ those that have failed and those that will fail"

As mentioned above, your strategy for backing up sadly has been your undoing. You should never rely on a single HDD copy. Lesson learned?

FWIW and IMO external drives of such massive size are not in themselves less or more reliable than internal ones. The advantage with internal ones is that it is possible to ensure good cool airflow to reduce extremes of heat cycling resulting in potential reduction in lifespan??? This is one reason IMO why the advice not to use externals as primary data drives long periods of spin & read/writes generatr heat that is not easily dissipated from sealed enclosures.
 
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No, but if I had to trust a single drive I would get an expensive heavy duty one designed for hard work and reliability.
 
GTG said:
No, but if I had to trust a single drive I would get an expensive heavy duty one designed for hard work and reliability.
Click to expand...
No such thing. There are server drives designed to work all the time, but they often rotate faster which means they can get hotter and require proper cooling. However, in such cases the trick is to join up multiple drives so when something fails which is guaranteed to happen just the when is not known the other drives contain the data (RAID). RAID is possible with some computers and with some NAS devices, for exampleto have two disks to mirror each other, but even then there is a high probability of losing the data if the device decides to pack up. If the data are important, then a back up is essential.
 
I've been backing up my photos since 2007 on a pair of external USB drives. They're used at least once a u least once a month, sometimes once every few days. Never yet had a problem. I buy new one whenever a drive gets nearly too full to do a dusk tidy. Now up to four of them. All Seagate drives.
 
LiamB said:
Hi,

So I've had my Seagate 3tb external hdd for around 4 months now, it is my only form of storage for all my pictures and i have about 400gb so far of raw files stored on it.

Well today i have tried to use it, and it runs extremely slow, takes about 10min for my PC to detect it, then when i try and use it, well it's impossible.

I did a checkdsk on it and i get the following sort of errors

The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 17D of name \LiamPics\100D5200\DSC_0009.NEF.
A disk read error occurredc000000e
The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 17E of name \LiamPics\100D5200\DSC_0011.NEF.
A disk read error occurredc000000e
The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 17F of name \LiamPics\100D5200\DSC_0012.NEF.

From what i have read online, this disk is already dying on me, so I've set all my files to copy back to my internal HDD at the moment, but I don't think this will be possible, it goes to around 6mb/s for around 2 seconds then drops down to 0bytes.

Has anyone else had such a short life span from an external hardrive before? If they are so unreliable then what's the point? Feeling rather frustrated at the moment.

Luckily the majority of the pictures on there I don't mind losing as they are just "practice" shots, but there are some, like for example my honeymoon pictures which i would like to keep hold of.

At least It's taught me not to only rely on one disk for storage!
Click to expand...

As others have said - every hard drive will fail. It's just a question of when - you should always consider them as a temporary storage medium - mitigated by using multiple copies. I this day and age, cloud is also a good option to supplement your backup strategy as it will be off site by default.

Regarding your existing disk - did you update anything on the PC before the issues started? New drivers, BIOS updates? It's possible it's a config issue and not a faulty disk - small glimmer of hope perhaps? Either way stop writing data to the disk.
 
I've had loads of hard disks fail on me. Just a few weeks ago, our 6tb WD back up drive failed. It happens a lot more than you'd like!

You really do have to have a robust back up strategy if your data is in any way important to you. There are many ways to approach this. Personally I have an external drive (1.5x the size of the internal drive) permanently plugged in that acts as primary backup (using Apple Time machine). Then have a wireless drive in the garage that is also backed up via time machine. The idea of the garage one is that there is a fire wall between it and the house.

In an ideal world I'd have a cloud based backup as well but haven't quite sussed the best way of doing that yet.
 
TLR-330 said:
No such thing. There are server drives designed to work all the time, but they often rotate faster which means they can get hotter and require proper cooling. However, in such cases the trick is to join up multiple drives so when something fails which is guaranteed to happen just the when is not known the other drives contain the data (RAID). RAID is possible with some computers and with some NAS devices, for exampleto have two disks to mirror each other, but even then there is a high probability of losing the data if the device decides to pack up. If the data are important, then a back up is essential.
Click to expand...

I think by this they were thinking of drives such as in the WD range, i.e. Blue, Green, Red, Black series, which do have several differences. So the Blue are the budget range, the green slightly better (and used to be the budget range), the blacks are the performance drives and the reds and red pros are rated for multi drive systems with active vibration protection. As with all of them there's a compromise between performance, price and heat.
 
Well, thanks for all your comments / solutions.

I will 100% be more careful and have more backup solutions from now on.
 
No, which is why all my work is saved across a number of drives.
 
One problem I've seen with external USB hard drives is that people leave them permanently connected to their computer so they are spinning all the time often even when the computer is switched off. Obviously reduces the life of the drive.
I use a usb3 dock on my desk and the hard disk is removed immediately after each backup. This means that there's minimal risk of the hard drive failing in between backups.
 
redsnappa said:
One problem I've seen with external USB hard drives is that people leave them permanently connected to their computer so they are spinning all the time often even when the computer is switched off. Obviously reduces the life of the drive.
I use a usb3 dock on my desk and the hard disk is removed immediately after each backup. This means that there's minimal risk of the hard drive failing in between backups.
Click to expand...

Agreed, I always turned mine off too!

I think I'm a bit disappointed with my self to be fair, i should have known better to just do 1 save location.
 
Probably overkill but I have 4 copies of my raw files. 2 completely up to date and two one backup behind. As I don't take hundreds of images every week I hope that this will be good enough.

There are many members in my camera club who have thousands sitting in one drive only. I have one friend who has 100000 images without any back up.
 
redsnappa said:
One problem I've seen with external USB hard drives is that people leave them permanently connected to their computer so they are spinning all the time often even when the computer is switched off. Obviously reduces the life of the drive.
I use a usb3 dock on my desk and the hard disk is removed immediately after each backup. This means that there's minimal risk of the hard drive failing in between backups.
Click to expand...
Not necessarily.

There's an argument that spinning up and down causes more strain than having disks run 24/7.

Certainly my 7 year old Samsung spinpoints have been running in my servers for yonks with no bother.
 
gad-westy said:
In an ideal world I'd have a cloud based backup as well but haven't quite sussed the best way of doing that yet.
Click to expand...

Mega gives you FREE 50GB cloud storage:

www.mega.nz

You can even use a throw away e-mail address with it.

Just choose a good strong password and drag and drop individual photos or complete folders.
 
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petersmart said:
Mega gives you FREE 50GB cloud storage:

www.mega.nz

You can even use a throw away e-mail address with it.

Just choose a good strong password and drag and drop individual photos or complete folders.
Click to expand...

Are you using them? Are their server farms in NZ or globally distributed?
 
Most modern hard drives are equipped with S.M.A.R.T. - Self-Monitoring and Reporting Technology. This hard drive diagnostic tool looks for evidence of impending mechanical failure, and can also tell you if a recent bump or power failure has created any potentially harmful hard drive errors.

There are lots of free S.M.A.R.T. utilities available on the Internet. One of them is PassMark's DiskCheckup™ tool, but a search will reveal many others.
 
petersmart said:
Mega gives you FREE 50GB cloud storage:

www.mega.nz

You can even use a throw away e-mail address with it.

Just choose a good strong password and drag and drop individual photos or complete folders.
Click to expand...

Cheers. I have a mega account. It is good but looking for something cost effective for a large amount of data. More like 4tb.
 
Brian G said:
Most modern hard drives are equipped with S.M.A.R.T. - Self-Monitoring and Reporting Technology. This hard drive diagnostic tool looks for evidence of impending mechanical failure, and can also tell you if a recent bump or power failure has created any potentially harmful hard drive errors.

There are lots of free S.M.A.R.T. utilities available on the Internet. One of them is PassMark's DiskCheckup™ tool, but a search will reveal many others.
Click to expand...
Not all failures will show up in a smart check.

The best policy is still multiple copies.
 
I think i will invest in a multi bay nas. One with raid tech. Bit overkill but can also use it as a media server etc.
 
Remember raid array is still only one copy. Even mirrored it's still vulnerable to deletion, corruption, hardware failures, fire/theft/flood etc etc

Also if you're going to run your lightroom raw files from a NAS make sure you have gigabit cable connection from it to your PC. Running that over wireless gets boring real quick.
 
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neil_g said:
It's also why you should always have at least two copies of your data on separate drives (raid counts as one copy) at all times.
Click to expand...
And stored in at least two separate physical locations. There are many threats to your data beyond a disk failing - theft, fire, floods, human error, malware, etc, etc.

There's an old saying among data professionals along the lines that any data which is stored on less than 3 devices in at least 2 separate locations doesn't exist.

(All my important data - including my photographs - is stored at least 5 times, with one copy 30 miles away. The last 4Tb external disk that I bought was £100, so it's cheap insurance.)
 
LiamB said:
I think i will invest in a multi bay nas. One with raid tech. Bit overkill but can also use it as a media server etc.
Click to expand...

Have a look on deals for the HP miniiservers. They pop up occaisionally for £130, have room for 4 disk drives (5 if you don't put a cd in)
 
neil_g said:
Not necessarily.

There's an argument that spinning up and down causes more strain than having disks run 24/7.

Certainly my 7 year old Samsung spinpoints have been running in my servers for yonks with no bother.
Click to expand...

Stop start running, heads parking and unparking. then if it's a usb drive, the moving it back into the cupboard etc.
 
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