Re: [IRCA] HD failure HELP!

[Rick Kunath <k9ao@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe Miller, KJ8O wrote:
> Walt, sorry to hear about your data loss. I bought a
> USB Hard Drive about 3 years ago, and after spending
> an evening making back-up copies of data off from
> three computers, I went back the next day and the unit
> would not work. The little light would not come on
> when connected to my computer, but would light up when
> disconnected. Returning it to the store of purchase,
> they could not repair it, nor recover any data. I
> ended up exchanging if for a memory stick which has
> never failed.

It's likely that the data could have been recovered, though not 
difficult, this would be beyond what a typical store would do. I just 
don't like USB drives, period.

Memory sticks are another animal, and I do like them.

> --- Walter Salmaniw <salmaniw@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> Some potentially very bad news, guys.  My new 500 GB
>> USB HD which I brought with me to Masset and
>> recorded some 250 GB or so of SDR-IQ files bit the
>> dust tonight.  I noticed while working on some
>> emails that the Blue LED light wasn't on.

Again, there is a real hard drive in there somewhere, and with luck 
after fixing the interface issues, or removing the drive and connecting 
it direct, you can still take a look at trying a recovery of the data.

Drives are so cheap these days and motherboards of any recent vintage 
can usually support a RAID array, so I either set up a RAID array 
on-board for data storage, or usually rely on a separate file server 
made from a junk machine with a RAID array on it for data storage over 
the network. Modern network speeds are so fast that this works really 
nicely, and has the advantage of being handy for moving files around and 
sharing data.

Don't be fooled by the software RAID that some motherboards foist off as 
RAID, this is nowhere near as good as real hardware RAID. With a real 
RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) you'll lose a drive, but no 
data. Replace the bad drive and the array will re-sync the new one, no 
data loss. Plug-in RAID controllers can be had cheap too, so this can be 
added to any motherboard.

You can make yourself up a really reliable file storage server using 
RAID cheaply. And they are portable, so field use would not be a problem 
either. There are several types of RAID, and you likely want RAID 5 or 6.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID



Something to think about with valuable data.

The main OS disk(s) I generally don't do as RAID, as I have all of the 
data backed up off-machine, and a recovery isn't difficult.

Rick Kunath



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