jdubu Loc: San Jose, CA

Once I suspect a problem with my C hard drive, I make a copy of that drive, verify the info and replace the old drive. I've done that once after losing a drive without backing up. All my work and photos are not on my C drive, that's another backup system entirely.

mas24 Loc: Southern CA

The OP did mention a desktop computer. You knew later. That has happened to me in replying to past posts. I own a 7 year old Lenovo laptop with a hard drive. So far no crashes. Hard drives, according to a computer technician, begin deteriorating at the five year mark. After that, expect anytime, a hard drive failure, the technician claims. To revive an older laptop, many are replacing hard drives with SSD, and increasing the RAM as well. The computer you mentioned above appears to be one amazing laptop. The Intel I7 processor, along with having a 512gb SSD of storage, and 1TB HDD. And graphics. I saw a 13" Mac Book Pro, at Best Buy Store, that had an Intel i5 processor, and way less storage, for $1300. Yes, I realize it is an Apple computer, and they cost more. But, I would gladly pay $1200 for that Lenovo, than $1300 for that Mac Book Pro for $1300. Just my choice. I also have a 10 year old HP laptop, not in use anymore, but still works.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I open up my computers every month or so and clean out the dust. A shot of compressed air does wonders. Just don't spin the fans too fast.

khorinek

The SSD Drive will allow you to boot up very fast. Not sure why you went with 2 HD's though, One 500 GB SSD would have been sufficient and then store photos on a HD offsite.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

LIke Longshadow, I incorporate taking the covers off my computers and blowing the dust out with an air hose. It's part of my spring cleaning ritual, though done more often than just springtime. Another thing that will be a thing of the past for you is defragging. SSDs do not need to be defragged. So don't.
--Bob

fetzler Loc: North West PA

It true that laptops are not good for photo editing but they can be used with an external monitor if you have the space.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

Interesting. The only HDD so far I've had die on my was an older IBM Lenovo LapTop before the brand was sold to China. Ironically it was a IBM branded HDD that went belly up. All the WD and Seagate and Japanese built ones I've had never died on me.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

Related: I lost a PC about a year ago. Everything except about three days was backed up and I had not really done much for those three days (that is why no backup) About a month later I decided to stick the old drive into an external dock. While I it may not have been usable as a boot drive, I could access all of my data files with no problem.

rcarol

I'm curious, how is Staples going to transfer files from a failed hard drive?

no12mo

You didn't give out the size of the original drive that failed. That would have helpful to me. It is so important for anyone who has valued data including pictures to learn how to either clone your drive(s) or make images of them.

My computers all have clones such that if I ever have a failure, I merely swap drives and I'm back in business.

That said, I am amazed that serious photographers (hobbyist, or professionals) do not have this as a first line defense against hard drive / solid state drive failures. It works perfectly with minimal effort to restore one's OS and important data. I am a proponent of a single drive for one's OS and data in the same partition with a cloning or imaging program *and* external drives to back up one's data just in case. And that includes protection against data ransom attacks.

Alan

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

They plug it in and use it as an external drive (not as a boot drive) It is unusual for both the OS portion of the drive and the MFT, Sanity track, FAT or whatever the file location are on your drive is called to fail at the same time. So treating it as a separate drive can allow you to get the data.

no12mo

Depends on the failure mode. A drive can fail to boot because of sector failure that happens to store system boot data making the computer boot up not possible. However, that same drive can be accessed via SATA to USB connection. I've done it. Once a non-bootable drive is connected to another computer the data may be transferable to another drive - depends on the severity of sector failure.

There is another way to recover a hard drive using Gibson Research's "SPINRITE" a program that goes deep into the drive and actually recovers data by using forensics. I have saved a few Operating Systems this way as an IT guy for my dept at work. It works off a boot disk / USB stick and proceeds after some menu choices to completely read the drive. If it encounters data that would not be retrievable in a Windows environment it and then uses forensics to recover the data and literally move it to another sector that is readable.

Having said that, if a hard drive is recovered, one should be cloning that drive to either another hard drive or a solid state drive. BTW SSD's have their own failure modes so if one decides to go SSD a cloning / backup approach should be still in place

The title of this thread is somewhat misleading. If Staples was able to retrieve data then the drive was still spinning - it didn't "stop." I've had a drive stop spinning. That data was forever lost but then I had an image of the data. Recovering data from a "stopped" hard drive is an entirely different story. One outside the scope of this thread.

See attachments for my safe storage of my backup hard / solid state drives - all clones or data backups

Alan

Kozan Loc: Trenton Tennessee

Well, before my HDD fails, I bought two 2TB Seagate HDD drives and a StarTech HDD duplicator. Opened up my HP All-in-one computer, took out the 1TB harddrive and duplicated (cloned) it. I am planning on getting a 2TB SSD drive and clone it. Plus get another 8GB SODIMM so I'll have 16 gigs of RAM. Surprisingly, all this was only $180. Sure beats trying to backup and restore.

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

"Placing photographs on the internal drive will take up space too."

Umm, that's what a separate large internal hard drive is for.....space for files, separate from the system drive (whether hard drive or SSD).

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

The idea behind having an SSD for the OS and app installs, and a large hard drive for storage, is that you do not need to backup the system and apps. You can easily and quickly reinstall OS and apps on a new drive/SSD. And a large hard drive is cheaper space than a large SSD for storage.

Having your data on a separate drive, though, does not give protection from data loss when (not "if") the storage drive fails. You still have to backup the storage drive's contents. If you don't backup in some way, you are still flirting with disaster.