Another Hard Drive Failure

[jyl]

Sigh. Seems like I have a hard drive fail every few months.

This was the 3GB Toshiba external drive that holds the Mac mini's iPhoto and iTunes libraries. So I am copying yesterday's backup to a spare external hard drive that will be temporarily used, until I get a replacement.

They sure don't make them like they used to.

[red-beard]

This is why I have a 4 drive Raid 1 system that backs itself up every night.

[Brando]

Was it a mechanical failure internally or just a dead controller? If you have an identical drive you can try swapping controllers to see if that gets you access to the data. Or did the external enclosure fail? Try mounting the drive internally via EIDE or SATA.

[Gogar]

Are you playing music all day etc.?

It does seem odd.

Check in "energy saver" preferences and see if the "put hard drives to sleep when possible" is checked.

If you have it unchecked and the computer is on often that means the drive is spinning 24/7.

Congrats on having the backup! Like they say, you only make that mistake once. I remember when I did it.

[jyl]

I have the drives running 24/7. When they used to sleep, iTunes and iPhoto couldn't find their libraries, and Time Capsule couldn't find its backup disk. I don't know if unchecking the "sleep" option was the best solution but it worked.

Can't install drive internally, this is a Mac mini, no spare bays.

Red, is there a RAID solution you recommend? I only need 1TB. Ideally a USB 3.0 as it doesn't need to be networked, it will be direct attached to the Mac. I'd like my data to survive two drive failures.

The failed drive spins but the Mac says it cannot read the drive.

Currently I have the Mac mini and the libraries live on an external drive (the one that failed). Another external drive backs up the Mac's internal boot drive and the library drive using Time Capsule. The boot and library drives are also cloned to another partition of the backup drive weekly. Finally, every now and then I manually copy the libraries over to an offsite drive that I keep in the garage. This is tedious. I'd like a transparent scheme.

[id10t]

$100 on a old computer, you want a large tower with plenty of bays and a healthy power supply
$20 on a PCI SATA card.
two, three or four 1tb+ size drives
Debian netinstall cd

Base debian install with just "base system" and "ssh server", put all on one small partition on one drive.

Install extra drives - at least two (raid-1, mirroring) but better would be 3 or 4 total in the system (so you can have raid-5 with failover), create matching partitions across all of them, set up software raid (1 for mirroring 5 for striping).

Mount your new raid someplace and make a directory with proper permissions on it.

Macs can mount volumes by SSH, or you can install samba and use CIFS/SMBFS (windows style filesharing).

sj@id10t:~/ $ cat /proc/mdstat 
Personalities : [raid1] 
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1]
      117185984 blocks [2/2] [UU]
      
unused devices: 

Originally Posted by jyl

I have the drives running 24/7. When they used to sleep, iTunes and iPhoto couldn't find their libraries, and Time Capsule couldn't find its backup disk. I don't know if unchecking the "sleep" option was the best solution but it worked.

Can't install drive internally, this is a Mac mini, no spare bays.

Red, is there a RAID solution you recommend? I only need 1TB. Ideally a USB 3.0 as it doesn't need to be networked, it will be direct attached to the Mac. I'd like my data to survive two drive failures.

The failed drive spins but the Mac says it cannot read the drive.

Currently I have the Mac mini and the libraries live on an external drive (the one that failed). Another external drive backs up the Mac's internal boot drive and the library drive using Time Capsule. The boot and library drives are also cloned to another partition of the backup drive weekly. Finally, every now and then I manually copy the libraries over to an offsite drive that I keep in the garage. This is tedious. I'd like a transparent scheme.

[Gogar]

Originally Posted by jyl

I have the drives running 24/7. When they used to sleep, iTunes and iPhoto couldn't find their libraries, and Time Capsule couldn't find its backup disk. I don't know if unchecking the "sleep" option was the best solution but it worked.

Just for clarification, I want to note that putting the "Hard Drives" to sleep isn't the same as putting the "computer" to sleep. Seems like you've tried your options, though.

[red-beard]

John,

Here is a mini-Raid system for about $75.

Vantec NexStar MX Dual Bay 3.5" SATA to USB 3.0 / eSATA RAID Enclosure - Newegg.com

I do not have this setup. Newegg has a couple of different setups for about the same price. Put "Raid and USB" in the search box.

My setup is for my business and the primary "drive" is Raid 1, but is backed up to another Raid 1 drive every night. The important business files are backed up offsite daily (accounting files) while the server is backed up offsite fully once a week. A little different than your needs.

[Shifter]

Do you have to be connected usb or can you run across your network?

Like suggested an external raid enclousure is the best bet. Easiest would be a NAS, (network attached storage) you can buy them almost preconfigured and plug and play. Read the reviews on Newegg, not all of them support time machine.

Or you can build your own, it will take a bit more space and energy, if you want to go that route, I have a mb with raid, cpu, ram and case that I can give you. You would need your own drives and power supply. It is older hardware, but it would work for what you need.

For my home system, I run a raid 10 with a raid 5 nas for backup. Overkill for a pc that I just surf and play games on, but I really hate losing any data!

[RWebb]

something is wrong - any HDD should be able to run for a looong time

you might want to buy something certified for use in a data center

[Gogar]

Don't get a 7200 higher RPM. It's needless speed and stress for pics and music.

[winders]

Get an Enterprise drive.

Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST3000NM0023 3 TB 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - Newegg.com

This drive comes with a 5 year warranty.

Scott

[jyl]

James, sent you a PM. Shifter, James, and anyone else, what dictates what RAID version you should run?

Here is my criteria - not only do I not want to lose data if one drive fails, I don't want to have to then drop everything and frantically fix it for fear that a second drive will fail, I want to be tolerant of multiple drive failures. I also do not want to rely on restoring from backup because it takes a long time and I have had bad experiences with restoring from Time Machine (like, it DIDN'T WORK!) so now I use Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner.

I was thinking a 4 bay RAID enclosure, but to be tolerant of two drive failures I'd need to mirror all 4 drives, is that ridiculous?

[Shifter]

Raid 5 will probably be your best fit.

Here is a pretty basic site that will answer some of your questions.

RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In a home solution a nas might be the simplest solution. The nas, since it is connected to the network, will allow multiple machines to connect, versus a raid enclosure that will generally require the connected computer to be running for access to any other device. Unless you don't foresee a need to share to multiple machines, then the enclosure is fine.

I run five drives in my desktop with a secondary two drive nas, so four drive isn't ridiculous at all. Buy five drives, put four in the enclosure, one on the shelf. One drive dies, replace it from the one on the shelf and move on. The raid array will just rebuild itself.

[winders]

I run a data center hundreds of drives so I have some experience in this regard.

RAID5? Run away. Use RAID10 is you must use RAID at all. The ZFS version of RAID5 is fine but I suspect you don't have any Sun-based systems at home.

Keep in mind that the main purpose of using RAID (other than RAID0) is to have high availability of data. RAID is not a backup system.

I would recommend skipping RAID entirely and use Time Machine and CCC to clone your volumes every night.

Read here:

Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 | ZDNet

http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt

Scott