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

[Rich Faulkner]

At XM we used Spinrite quite a bit and had very good results with doing
data recovery and recovery of HDDs.  It's saved my bacon at the studio I
support here in Lilburn and got me to where I could make a good back-up
of data and rebuild a drive for which there was no back-up.  In that
particular case, Spinrite made it possible for me to even Ghost the
drive in question and build a good copy.  We only lost one day of work
and the whole studio was back in business.

I'm game for other tools that would do the same thing but am not
experienced with them (whatever they are).  If anyone has links to them
I'd like to review them...

Spinrite doesn't solve all problems but it sure has been useful in my
toolkit.

RinL



On Wed, 2011-01-05 at 15:20 -0500, Pat Regan wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:23:47 -0500
> Ron Frazier <atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com> wrote:
> 
> > However, even if there are not obvious results, the intensive read
> > rewrite process will refresh weak data and improve the reliability of
> > the drive.  If data is unreadable, it will go to EXTREME measures to
> > recover it.  Even normal operations are slow.  It just so happens that
> > I'm running Spinrite at the moment on my Son's laptop with a 250 GB
> > drive.  I'm using the most intensive level of analysis.  It's almost
> > finished after 20 hours with no errors.  I think my hard drives are a
> > bit faster than my Son's.
> 
> If there are no read errors on a drive Spinright's rewrite cycle is of
> no use whatsoever.
> 
> Spinrite's rewriting exploits the fact that IDE and SATA drives will
> only relocate a bad sector on a write and not on a read.  SCSI and SAS
> drives will relocate a bad sector on a read, or at least they should.
> 
> Once a drive starts relocating sectors it is usually the beginning of
> the end of its useful like.  I don't trust data to drives that start
> showing read errors.
> 
> Hard drives are very cheap.  Your data is probably valuable.  
> 
> > Don't be alarmed if you see lots of seek errors on the SMART
> > monitoring screen.  Seagate drives, in particular, show huge numbers
> > here.  I don't think they are accurate.  Other drives may do that as
> > well.  Apparently it's fairly common.  It does NOT mean the drive is
> > about to blow up.  I would confirm any errors on the SMART monitoring
> > screen with another application, as that's not Spinrite's main
> > purpose.  The video, linked below, talks about how to interpret smart
> > data.  One useful piece to monitor is the error rate.
> 
> Don't put too much faith in smart.  If smart says a drive is dying it
> most definitely is.  The inverse isn't true.  I've had plenty of drives
> die that recently passed a full smart test.
> 
> I've never run Spinrite and I probably never will.  I understand how
> and why it works but I see little value in rewriting data to a failing
> drive.  It seems much safer to me to write the recovered data to a good
> drive.
> 
> Pat
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