TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Great suggestion, and when you see the bad/relocated block number asymptoting or other anomalies, a drive failure may be imminent. Some monitoring SW will allow you to set limits and warnings when a SMART parameter exceeds the limit.

Mark Williams

Thanx

eskiles Loc: Palmer Alaska

I still download my pictures onto DVD! That way they are always safe!

Lucian Loc: From Wales, living in Ohio

Had three Seagates go on me, one replaced in my laptop from a 500 to a 750GB and the bloody thing fail in 30 days. Lost some great new photos from our Babymoon holiday to Boston. A holiday while preggers before the baby comes (Babymoon) (Honeymoon like holiday).

I did not back it up because my 2TB Seagate was acting up so I was waiting until that got sorted, which never happened since it too failed. Both failed then three months later my older 3TB Seagate failed on me, so in all, I lost a lot!

I will NEVER buy another Seagate drive until they offer complete free data recovery of a drive still under warranty. Seagate offer to have a cleanroom recover the data but starting at a minimum of $750 up to $3,00 that I would have to pay. Of course I could not afford that.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I would consider instead getting a BluRay MDisk drive and using MDisks. Depending on the manufacturer, DVDs can have a short life before becoming too degrade to read. The MDisk, on the other hand, in addition to being larger (25 or 100GB last I checked), they will last longer than your life and beyond. MDisks are the most reliable long-term media that I’m aware of.

Stanroban

I agree, have three seagate external drives for archiving, but use them fairly often and fortunately never had a problem. I would like however to learn more about the NAS system that another gentleman talked about.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

howIseeit Loc: Kootenays, BC Canada

Are You a Blue Ray burner (internal or external) to burn MDisks?
btw, whats an MDisk as opposed to normal DVD disk?

howIseeit Loc: Kootenays, BC Canada

meant to say: are you suggesting internal or external type burner

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

With HDDs, like most else, you get what you pay for. The cheap junk is just that. I ONLY use 7200rpm drives in high end enclosures or Synology NAS servers. I have over 100 TB of storage available, all of which is backed up in one form or another. To be safe, you need to be serious and only by the best stuff. Best of luck.

cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

Quit the things with moving parts and go to solid state storage (what alliteration). I've never had a problem with them.

jefflane

I use mine only for backup about once a month and I've lost one seagate in about 20 years. I usually replace them to get larger capacity.

Mike1017

I have 10 external 5 internal never had a problem Western Digital many years of use Mike

SuperflyTNT Loc: Manassas VA

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives. You need multiple drives and there are different levels of RAID. Most common for home use are RAID 0 and RAID 1, both of which require at least two drives. In RAID 0, data is stored in blocks that are “striped” across the drives. It’s very performant since the work is distributed across the drives for faster reads and writes, but there is no additional security, if one drive goes you lose half your data. Most common for home use is RAID 1 in which the drives are mirrored. All data is written to both drives, so if one drive goes down all your data is still safe on the other drive. It’s not as fast because it’s writing everything to both drives, but it’s more secure. Besides speed the other disadvantage is storage. If your RAID consists of two 3TB drives, with RAID 0 you have 6TB of storage, with RAID 1 you only have 3TB because everything is doubled. There are also RAID levels 5 and 6 which stripe the data and use parity blocks to rebuild the data from drives that go bad and level 10 that uses parity and mirroring, but those all require more than two drives in your array.

SuperflyTNT Loc: Manassas VA

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