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

[Ron Frazier]

On Thu, 2011-01-06 at 06:23 -0500, Pat Regan wrote:

<snip>

> I really wish hard drives were more predictable.  I have a large
> percentage of drives die in the first few days of service, in the first
> few weeks/months of service, and also after a year.  I just have no
> trust in any hard drives :).
> 

That's why I thrash my new ones to death for about 200 hours.  If they
survive the torture, then I use them.  It's not feasible for me to burn
them in for 3 months though.

> I was so happy when I switched out my laptop to a proper SSD.  I
> figured I wouldn't have to restore from backups as often...  I've RMAed
> this drive twice already, probably controller failures each time.
> 
> Pat

An SSD is essentially a memory stick / card on steroids, with some glue
logic thrown in.  Their long term reliability and quirks are unproven.
I've had several memory sticks or cards go bad.  When I was teaching at
Lanier Tech for a while, I always told the students to never store their
work on a single memory stick alone, and to not trust the devices.

I'd keep doing those backups you like (which I agree with), probably to
a type of magnetic media.  One thing that concerns me with SSD's,
particularly when the design features are on the 45 nM scale, is that
something like cosmic rays or geomagnetic storms, not to mention the EMP
from a tactical nuclear weapon, could totally wipe out the data.
Granted, if a nuclear weapon goes off, we might have bigger problems,
but if it's an isolated terrorist attack with a small device, we might
still be having to continue with our daily lives.  I don't spend huge
amounts of time worrying about that.  Anyway, it's taken 25 years for
magnetic hard drives to go from 80 MB to 2000 MB, and we're still
concerned and confused about how to make them more reliable and usable.
I predict that the dynamics and implications of SSD's will take a
similar amount of time.

Leo Laport, who runs the This Week In Tech podcast network, recommends
the following backup strategy based on numerous people he interviews:

3 - 2 - 1

3 copies of any data, on 2 separate media types, with at least 1 off
site.

I sort of do a 3 - 1 - 1 when I get around to it, which is anywhere from
2 weeks to 2 months.  I image the drive to an external HDD, copy that
image to another external HDD, disconnect both HDD's, and have
Jungledisk backing up data to Amazon S3 servers every 6 hours.  If the
house burned down, or we had a flood or theft, I might lose the local
copies.  I could get almost all the important data back from Amazon, but
it wouldn't be a pretty process.  Backing up 3 computers for myself
(with Linux and Windows), 1 for my Son, and 1 for my Dad is very
challenging, and I'm always behind.  I'd like to find a better solution.

Sincerely,

Ron

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
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Ron Frazier

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linuxdude AT c3energy.com