Hard Drive Storage
 

I have an external Iomega hard drive that has crapped out. I was using it as a storage/backup/server for my home network. (Keeps showing failure to write errors.)

What is a better solution for accessing music and video and storing picture back ups?

There's nothing wrong with using a regular hard drive; it's definitely the cheapest way.

How long did it last?

If you're really just using a drive to 'back up', then the best way to make it last is to have it external and turn it off when you're not 'backing up.' The less it spins, the longer it lasts.

It lasted about 2 years, I left it on all the time.

Failure to write could be heads or bad sectors.

Take the data off an reformat the long way, not quick format. Should block the bad sectors from being available.

If that fails then likely heads are toast so dump it.

The drives in the machine I'm typing on have been running for four years with their only downtime being a power outage that went beyond my UPS's battery life. I've seen them in excess of ten years in the business side. As long as you stay away from Western Digital you should get many many years of use out of one drive.

Now if you want to go longer... you can use tape, or a small external chassis with two or three drives in it setup in an array.

I have Windows Home Server with 4 hard drives running 7/24 to back up all 7 PC's in our house. Once a drive gets to be 2 years old, I replace it with a newer one. I also make sure they're not too hot...

Dunno if this veers off-topic, but:

Dell tech. had to replace motherboard and both 500 gig hard drives (raid 1setup) before he could reload Windows on my yr. old box. Arrrgh! Four days to download my encrypted Carbonite backup awaited me.

Fortunately, my computer savvy buddy was able to use a SATA dock to recover my data and erase the old disks before I had to return them to Dell (or pay for the new drives).

On his recommendation I then bought a 2 terabyte external drive ($90) and loaded everything, including system (Carbonite only backs up data) onto it.

So now, if I crash and burn I can use the image thereon to put everything back, exactly the way it was before the crash - no reloading Windows, apps, preferences, customizations, etc.

I keep the two terabyte drive stored in a remote location in case zombies burn down my house, or...

For $55 a year, I'm keeping my subscription to Carbonite (which saved my bacon on a previous crash) - I figure you can't be too safe.

Can you back up an itunes library on carbonite?

The itunes in the only thing I am going to lose, but I hate the thought of ripping all those cd's again.

Yes, it grabs everything in documents and settings by default, which is where that's stored.

If you want a reliable HDD back-up, I'd pick up a couple of cheap 500GB+ 7500rpm drives and set up an external RAID array (as Scott mentioned) Or, you can buy them pre-built if you don't want to hassle with sourcing parts and putting one together (obviously more $$ going that route).

Thanks for the ideas, I am going to try and get the stuff off of the drive and reformat first.

I work with storage.

1:st, you cannot say "brand X is rubbish, brand Y is good". Every new series is unique. IBM Deathstars frequently crashed, but next series was good. Certain WD models were bad, others were good etc.

2:nd, only way to really survive single disk crash is to run some kind of RAID. RAID-5 is most common (big SATA discs in RAID-5 might get problematic while rebuilding due to error frequency vs. disk size but it's out of scope right now).

3:rd, real life data collected by Google on some 100k discs reveals that drives don't like it too cold either.

For home use, a small NAS box with three or four discs is good enough. There are plenty of models to choose from. I found Netgear NV+ or NVX to work fine. They can be used by multiple computers at once and will survive one dead disc.

And last: RAID is NOT a backup. It will not save your a$$ if you accidentally delete something or hardware takes a dump. If you value your data, have a off-line copy. (disc, tape or cloud, doesn't matter...just make sure you have fairly recent copy)