Seriously Annoyed

[merdat]

As the guys have said 'try the freezer trick' ,won't do any harm. I've got a couple of 'spinpoints' which i've never tried yet , better get them out of the static bags and test them I suppose. Data recovery can be very expensive that why it is vitally important to do regular back ups to CD/DVD's or something similar. Can't say i'm a great fan of throwing all the data onto 500 plus drives as back up, prefer back up's to cd's always making at least a couple.

[Taz]

It's not the data/power cables to the drives or the PSU itself is it?

[Ilandor]

A couple of years ago I had a crappy cheap PSU, it kept breaking hard drives (either that, or I was very unlucky), I went through about 5 Western Digital 200-320GB HDDs in just under a year. They just wouldn't boot, and half the time wouldn't even register in BIOS, and they were clicking quite a bit.

Anyway, I tried the freezer thing with them, I put them in anti-static bags, then wrapped those in cling film and put them in a plastic box, which was left in the freezer overnight, it was the first time I had tried it so I was a bit paranoid. But it worked nicely, they lasted about an hour before Windows started to give errors, which was enough time to transfer all the files I needed over to another drive.

[Kumagoro]

The 30 40 quid recovery is normally undeleting files pcb swaps. If the
platters need to be transplanted then it jumps to a a few hundred quid.

Have you tried swapping the pcb off the barely working one to the dead one?

[peterb]

Just a thought - but I have experienced that clicking from portable enclosures when the USB port has been unable to supply enough power. Samsung drives do have a good reputation (I have 8 kicking around in various systems), but no matter how good, there is always the chance of a bad one - however the odds of you getting two are really quite small. It may be that your PSU is giving up - not giving sufficiebnt power on the 12 volt rails (which power the platter motor and the head seek mechanism - the clicking could be the head loading - the power drain pulling down the 12 volt rail - so the head unloads - 12 volt rail voltage increases - head loads - 12 volt rail drops.... etc)

SATA drive power connectors are hard to get at, unless you have molex to SATA converters. If you have, it may be worth sticking a voltmeter across the 12 volt line and measuring it. Failing that, try substituting another PSU.

[neonplanet40]

I dont think it would be my psu as it is an Enermex liberty 620watt. Not something i would call cheap and ive never had any problems with it in the past. I will try after work tomorrow connecting it to different power leads etc. I guess i could just be getting really bad luck but it has put me right of samsung drives, as 2 months to me is terrible lol. Western Digital have always served me well. Its just getting the money to buy 1.5tb of drives to hold all my data and then another 1.5 TB to raid it

Not cheap. I will buy an icybox enclosure and see if that helps.

Neon

[Funkstar]

IIts just getting the money to buy 1.5tb of drives to hold all my data and then another 1.5 TB to raid it

RAID-5? then you only need 2TB of storage (assuming 500GB disks)

[neonplanet40]

Sorry i dont know much about raid. I thought you got say 3 1TB drives and when you raided them you would only actually have 1.5TB as the other 1.5tb would be a mirror of your existing files. 2 TB is still expensive!

[Dreaming]

Sorry i dont know much about raid. I thought you got say 3 1TB drives and when you raided them you would only actually have 1.5TB as the other 1.5tb would be a mirror of your existing files. 2 TB is still expensive!

It's still quite expensive. Basically, RAID is just a group of cheap(ish) disks that are designed to help save data - but they are not a replacement for regular backups. To make it easier to understands the different 'setups' of raids are giving different classifications:

Raid0
Raid1
Raid10
Raid5

and probably loads more I don't know about.

With 2 hard disks, you can backup the data by mirroring, so you write the same data to two drives.

However, if you have three or more disks, you can use raid5 methods: it splits the data across say 3 hard drives, adds up the bits (1s and 0s) from say the first 3 disks, if it's odd it will write a 0 to the 4th disk and if even it will write a 1. (or something to that effect) Therefore the data can be rebuilt from a raid5 array even if one drive dies.

They all have advantages and disadvantages, it's worth checking out wikipedia for a brief overview.

[neonplanet40]

So which Raid do you think would be best for me? Also do any of the icybox enclosers do sata and ide? Or is it just one or the other?

Thanks

Mark

[EtheAv8r]

I have 4 of these drives in my system - purchased as a result of the Custom PC Labs test, and they have been running fine for many months, and am using Intel matrix RAID.

Samsung drives have a great reputation. I have also used them in two other systems built for friends, again using Intel matrix RAID.

Unless there is a faulty batch... it it strange to get multiple failures. I hope you get this resolved... maybe there is some testing SCAN can do, or even Samsung - I am sure they would not want an issue like this to cloud their rep?

[peterb]

AKASA do a SATA/IDE enclosure (and there is an Esata connector on the back if you are using SATA drives)

Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

If it is backup you are after - no version of RAID is suitable for you. If you have RAID, any filesystem corruption will be mirrored on both (or across all) drives and you still have single point of failure. Far better is to use the second drive as an offline backup store - You can clone the system drive periodically - then if the system drive fails, you can swap it for the cloned drive and be up an run ning again with the configuration you had at the time of the last cloning.

Don't get me wrong - if it is camputer up time that is important to you (a server perhaps) then RAID 1 or 5 might be suitable - but RAID is NOT a substitute for backup! (Just for the avoidance of doubt - if you are running a RAID system - you still need to take off-line backups - unless ypou don't care about losing stuff!)

[shaithis]

So which Raid do you think would be best for me?

What are you using it for? What are your needs? (Read speed, write speed, reliability, resilience?)

[neonplanet40]

Icy Box External Enclosure IB-360AStUS SATA + USB Combo - Black/LED

I got this enclosure? Hope its ok.

Basically i just want reliability from raid. I want it so that if one of my drives fail then i still have all my data. Also this would save me having to backup myself every now and again because when cloning, it is all done there and then in real time.

Neon

Either way. Backing up 1.3TB of storage isnt going to be cheap. So i think dvd's is out of the question. I dont have the will power to backup on hundreds of disks

[arthurleung]

Icy Box External Enclosure IB-360AStUS SATA + USB Combo - Black/LED

I got this enclosure? Hope its ok.

Basically i just want reliability from raid. I want it so that if one of my drives fail then i still have all my data. Also this would save me having to backup myself every now and again because when cloning, it is all done there and then in real time.

Neon

Either way. Backing up 1.3TB of storage isnt going to be cheap. So i think dvd's is out of the question. I dont have the will power to backup on hundreds of disks

You can easily do it under 200 quids with 3x500GB drives

[neonplanet40]

Ahh i still dont get this! lol. Never used raid before.

However as far as i can see it im going to have a lot of hard drives. The reason i was going to get 750-1tb drives was so it would take up less space in case. I want to keep it as empty as possible.

So if i was to get this Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

I could use it to hold most of my hard drives couldnt i? (well 4 anyway)