[ale] Which large capacity drives are you having the best luck with?

[Greg Freemyer]

Spinrite is one of those tools whose claims live on the edge of reality.

Many of their claims about recovery look like bunk to me, but much of
what you said is real.

But a smart long selftest (man smartctl) is probably just as good as
spinrite.  (All new drives support smart).  Use it just as you
currently use spinrite and I'd bet you get all the same effect.

Greg


On 1/3/11, Ron Frazier <atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com> wrote:
> Ryan,
>
> I realize it's after Christmas, but I just saw this.  I don't have any
> 1.5 TB or 2 TB drives yet.  However, I've always liked the Seagate brand
> and have had good performance and reliability with them.  They also have
> a 5 year warranty.  I have a couple of 1 TB Seagate drives in my desktop
> box that I built and they seem to do fine.  I also have a Hitachi 500 GB
> drive that works well also.
>
> No matter what you buy, I would get a copy of Spinrite ( $ 90 )
> ( http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm ).  This is one of the world's most
> advanced disk drive analysis and recovery programs.  The installer is a
> Windows program, but once you run that, you can create a bootable CD
> image which boots on it's own and has it's own clone of DOS.  It has to
> run own its own without the normal OS running.
>
> This will allow you to run an exhaustive read, invert, write, read,
> invert, write analysis on the drive.  Now, while you don't need to
> recover data on a new drive, this reads and writes every bit in every
> sector twice (to 1 and 0), and forces the drive's firmware to make a
> very thorough analysis of what's good and what's not and map out any bad
> areas.  I do this to ALL new drives I get, and all new computers (it's
> non destructive).  (Actually, on new drives, I run one sweep of a drive
> wipe program to put random data on the drive, rather than having all 1's
> or 0's.  Then I run Spinrite.)  I also try to run Spinrite on each drive
> 2 - 3 times per year.  Doing this over time reads weak sectors while
> they're still readable and maps them out if they're getting flaky.  If
> you do this, barring mechanical, power, or controller problems, you can
> keep a drive functioning flawlessly for many years.
>
> The creator of Spinrite is an expert on computer security.  He has an
> excellent podcast on the topic at the address below.  Also, on almost
> every show, he cites an example of a testimonial of a dying drive that
> has been recovered by this software.  I really think it's worth a look.
> I have no financial interest in the product, but am a happy user.
>
> http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
> http://www.twit.tv/sn
>
> If you decide to get and use the product, I'll be glad to explain how to
> run it.  On drives of the size you're talking about, expect the
> procedure to take about 48 hours to run.  However, it can be stopped and
> resumed.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron
>
> On Tue, 2010-12-21 at 22:39 -0500, Matty wrote:
>> I want to play around with openfiler and freenas over Xmas, and I've
>> been reading tons of 1.5TB and 2TB disk drive reviews tonight. From
>> what I've gathered so far, the reliability of large capacity drives
>> sucks and you need to factor this in when picking your RAID levels
>> (I'm going with RAID6). Amazon currently has 1.5TB drives for $60:
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ZCXJZE?ie=UTF8&tag=tp6708-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002ZCXJZE"
>>
>> So I'm thinking about picking up a few of these for my project. Anyone
>> have any thoughts on these drives or any of the other 1.5TB - 2TB
>> drive manufacturers? Trying to find something that performs reasonably
>> well and is relatively reliable.
>>
>> Thanks for any feedback,
>> - Ryan
>> --
>> http://prefetch.net
>
> --
>
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
> call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
> mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)
>
> Ron Frazier
>
> 770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT c3energy.com
>
>
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Greg Freemyer
Head of EDD Tape Extraction and Processing team
Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist
http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer
CNN/TruTV Aired Forensic Imaging Demo -
   http://insession.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/23/how-computer-evidence-gets-retrieved/

The Norcross Group
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