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Monday, January 19, 2009

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Oooh, I Got Trouble. Drive Trouble.

Bruce A Johnson | 01/19

And You Might Too!

I love a bargain. That’s one of the reasons I take emails from TigerDirect. Not everything Carl Fiorentino and his troops come up with is great, but often you can find real gems. And so I thought when I saw a Seagate Barracuda 1.5Tb hard drive on sale for $140. In the collapsing world of hard drive manufacturers, Seagate has always had a sterling reputation, one they defend with 5-year warranty. So I figured, what could go wrong?

Well, this could go wrong.

It seems that Seagate 1.5Tb drives running under Windows Vista and Mac OSX can slow down, freeze up or fail altogether. Apparently, all data is still preserved on the otherwise-bricked drive, but still: Is this the best we can expect? I mean, this is SEAGATE. The ~~Cadillac~~ Lexus of hard drives. Seagate says the drives can be repaired with a firmware update, and has set up a webpage to help identify the defective drives.

I haven’t yet installed that drive, and I won’t till it is cleared by Seagate. But still, it gives me chills. I guess we aren’t any less safe that we ever were, but how many projects do you have stored on hard drives? I have - literally - dozens.

What do you trust for long-term storage?

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Wow. That’s a heck of a reply!

As comprehensive as that answer is, I think my solution will involve two eSATA “toasters”, several discrete hard drives, and a Drobo as the backup to the backup.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/20 at 10:39 AM

Thanks for the heads-up. I just bought a few Seagate drives a few months ago to populate some new machines, but fortunately, their model numbers are not on Seagate’s “oops” list.

thanks -
Chris

Posted by Chris Meyer on 01/20 at 12:27 PM

I haven’t had a drive failure in 3 years. The last one that failed was a Seagate drive. Fortunatley I have backed up all of my projects to CDs. The media is already on the original tapes, and I can reconstruct the finals if I need to.

Speaking of making something Archival for use years down the road is a totally different subject from simple backup of a project for safety during production.

Posted by DanConklin on 01/20 at 01:32 PM

DLT or LTO3 or LTO4 tape.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/20 at 09:39 PM

Whatever happened to writing things down?

jk

Posted by Charles Angus on 01/21 at 02:41 AM

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