My Hard Drive Crashed

[Campsalot]

Really I would suggest a hard drive in a aluminum enclosure with the fan.  The reason I did not suggest this to Gombo was because of the cost. Then mount and unmount the drive when you wanted to back up.
I have never had an issue with a Western Digital drive.  However, I never had an external drive like I suggested to Gombo. The ones I use are as I described above which I back up over a network to a Linux box.  Probally a lot more than Gomboman needs.
I would not go the DVD route becasue of the number of DVD's it would take.  Also, that makes backing data up a real pain.

[svspa]

Agreed campsalot, DVDs are somewhat of a pain but relatively cheap and safe. At least the dual layer DVD's will give you about 9gb of storage per disk. I think gomboman said he has an 80gb primary drive so that's not too much data.

I have used more than 10 western digital drives in various systems I have built over the years and also never had a failure.

But if anyone out there is really looking for the solution you may want  to look at a mirrored raid array. A mirrored raid array is constantly keeping two sets of disk drives in sync, so if any one drive fails the backup disks take over while you swap out the bad drive. Buffalo technology makes a pretty popular version in their Terastation products (www.buffalotech.com).

I just saw that western digital has also come out with a dual drive 1 terabyte mybook, that supports either mirrored raid or striped raid.

I have been looking at options for my media center pc. I need upwards of a terabyte of storage for my home videos, music and photos. Not sure yet whether I want to go with something like the terastation or just a couple of big external drives.

Good luck gomboman, hope you find the solution that works for you.

Steve

[badval]

You can "roll your own" external hard drive for less money than buying one off the shelf.  In addition to saving money, you can get some very useful backup software & have the size & specs you truly want - not just what's available at the moment.

For a solid backup dirve on a budget:

This enclosure  +  This drive  = 250GB external drive for ~ $115 with some good software.

Compare to this one from BestBuy that costs $25 more, has no fan, and no good backup software.  

I have a fanless, mostly plastic external enclosure on my other drive.  It does what it should, but its very hot.  I'd recommend going with aluminum and a small fan in the enclosure.  You'll pay a little more, but you could also extend the drive's useful life a few years.

[svspa]

good point badval, but the 250gb mybook is selling for $83 at Dell's site and for $80 at my local office depot (with $70 rebate).

Steve

[Gomboman]

You can "roll your own" external hard drive for less money than buying one off the shelf.  In addition to saving money, you can get some very useful backup software & have the size & specs you truly want - not just what's available at the moment.

For a solid backup dirve on a budget:

This enclosure  +  This drive  = 250GB external drive for ~ $115 with some good software.

Compare to this one from BestBuy that costs $25 more, has no fan, and no good backup software.  

I have a fanless, mostly plastic external enclosure on my other drive.  It does what it should, but its very hot.  I'd recommend going with aluminum and a small fan in the enclosure.  You'll pay a little more, but you could also extend the drive's useful life a few years.

OK, I never thought about rolling my own. You're saying you can buy an internal drive and install it in an external case? Is there an advantage to having an external drive versus having a slave drive installed within the case for backups?

The drive that failed was a Western Digital Caviar 80GB IEDE drive. My six year old daughter was playing an old Windows 95 game and turned the power off without shutting down properly. When I went to reboot the drive was toast.

Would a mac have crashed like this? I can't believe my wife still wants to spend 1K to restore the data. She never once looked at the digital photos that we lost......

[Cola]

try looking for a file called found000, found001, etc.
This happened to me last year and I lost nothing.
Pull the drive and mount itt into another PC
it should be the d or e drive there
see what comes up
good luck
Steve

[geekd]

I've lost hard drives in the past, and it sucks.

I can't give you advice on how to retrieve your lost data, but I can answer some questions about hard drives.

Seagate, Western Digital, whatever. It's all the same.  One is not better than the other.  After 5 years or less, they will die.  They will all die.  (sorry - drama off).

Buy a approx $30 external IDE hard drive case, aluminum would be nice.  USB.  Buy the biggest regular IDE hard drive you can afford.  Buy the one with the best price per Gig of storage.  Brand doesn't really matter.  Since it's a backup drive, RPM and cache or any of that other crap doesn't really matter either.   You're going to be accesing it through a USB port, that's going to be your bottleneck, not drive RPM.

It's pretty easy to put the 2 together, and when you plug it in, Windows should recognise it no problem. Then just copy your important stuff to it once a week or so.  It might fail, or your main drive might fail, but what's the odds they both fail at the same time?


The advantage to an external drive like I sugest above is that it's easy to move from computer to computer.  Also, it has it's own power supply, so if your daughter turns the machine off, only the internal drive(s) will get thier power yanked, the external drive will be fine.

Would this have happened on a Mac?  Yes.  Harddrives DO NOT like it when the power suddenly goes away.  These days they are much better about it, but they still don't like it.

-geekd

[badval]

Is there an advantage to having an external drive versus having a slave drive installed within the case for backups?  

Yes, there are many advantages.

The drive should last much longer (theoretically) because it's only powered on when you need it.
It's not taking up space inside your case, could eliminate 1 IDE ribbon cable, and is not generating heat inside your case.  All of these things should help (a little) reducing overall internal temperature, which could extend the life of other components.

It's portable.  Truly plug & play so you can easily move massive amounts of data to different machines.

Keeps old technology useful.  The newest Intel motherboards only support one IDE cahnnel (2 devices) natively and use 3rd party driver for second (if there is a second) channel.  Installing IDE hard drives on these systems can get painful.  You're either killing it's performance by pairing it with an optical drive (it will slow down to the opical drive's transfer mode even if it's the "master") or you're increasing boot times and introducing possible stability issues running 3rd partysecondary IDE channel like JMicron.  Going external, you keep the IDE hard drives out of the system architecture.

The down sides:

Higher cost (because you're paying for the external case too)
Slower transfer rate - only a factor for huge amounts of data
Greater chance to damage the drive - i.e drop the whole thing while moving it, bang something into it on your desk, etc.

I lose those little jump drives all the time.  I haven't lost an external hard drive.....yet  

[badval]

Seagate, Western Digital, whatever. It's all the same.

Mostly true with one huge exception:  MDT drives.  MDT are "refurbished" drives that come from major manufacturers and are "white labeled" and branded as MDT (Magnetic Data Technology).  They're a few bucks cheaper and are a real crapshoot for quality.  I tried 4 of them with a 75% fail rate within 1 year.  These are factory seconds and were rejected from Seagate/WD/Maxtor/etc process for a reason.  Not worth saving a few bucks taking a chance with this brand.

Kind of like spas - everyone has their own opinion on what brand is best.  In my experience, Maxtor drives run a little hotter and WD drives fail earlier.  Samsung and IBM/Hitachi respond a little slower.  Seagate (right now) seems to be the best blend of noise, heat, speed, reliabilty, & cost for standard SATA-II internal drives.  YMMV.  

[Gomboman]

Thanks for all the help. I bought a Seagate 400GB Internal Ultra ATA/100 for $99 at my local Frys store today. The same drive at Bestbuy was $219. I was looking for a smaller drive but this one was cheaper. Now I just need an external case and I'll be set.

[Campsalot]

Go for it Gombo!  Keep us posted.  This string has been fun. Maybe we could get the MOD to ad a weekly "Gizmo's with Gombo" tech forum.  LOL!  I like the sound of that.