The Death Of The External Hard Drive

All hard drives with moving parts will fail eventually, usually in the first few months or after four years.
qft

Big name manufacturers like LaCie or Western Digital are more reliable than no-name brands

LaCie just makes enclosures, all their hard drives are sourced from OEMs. I think they're usually hitachis or fujitsus or whatever.

RIP. I'll speak of you fondly pics, music, docs

wow... no recovery options?

aw, my sympathies :(

On the plus side, Dom, we live in a magical time. If you want to listen to anything you really don't need it in a little box. For 95% of recorded music its as quick as a google search with the word "mediafire" in it, so just start rebuilding as fast as you can listen.

Man, I was hoping this thread title was a band name.

not if it's music you created!

xp

yeah, it's likely gone for good. luckily (and kind of mysteriously), all of my own music/recording files were spared -- but I basically lost all my mp3s, and pictures I've taken since I moved to san fran :(

I've been thinking about RAR-ing that stuff up with a password and putting it on Amazon's cloud thing or something. Anyone else done this? My hard drives die constantly. I've lost tons of pics and original music over the years, which still breaks my heart to think about it.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hdd_flooding/

Disk drive shipments are set to plummet by nearly 28 per cent in Q4 – 48 million fewer units than a year ago – in the wake of the devastating flooding in Thailand, says beancounter iSuppli.

The ripple effect of the worst flooding in the country for more than half a century is also likely to be felt across many sectors of IT and other industries, the analyst warned.

"The drop [in hard disk] is the largest sequential decrease on a percentage basis since the fourth quarter of 2008 when shipments fell 21.2 percent during the worst point of the last electronics downturn," said iSuppli.

It estimates 30 per cent of hard disk production will be lost in Q4 as factories are inundated with water, and as a result prices will rise by 10 per cent – which seems a little conservative given the recent swing already seen in the UK.

As has been well documented, the world's largest HDD manufacturer WD has been hit hardest by the rising waters and its market share is forecast to dramatically fall by the end of this year, leaving it in third place, while Toshiba is expected to fall from fourth to fifth.

Disk drives underpin the digital age and shortages will be felt across swathes of the IT industry, while the flooding has also hit car makers.

"In the PC market, the HDD shortage is likely to have the greatest impact on notebook PCs. The specific HDD plants affected by the flooding make devices designed for mobile computers," said iSuppli.

So far Acer has confirmed price rises on the next batch of shipments and rival ASUS revealed yesterday it will run out of disk drives by the end of this month. Other PC vendors have noted the challenges in securing HDDs but have not commented further.

However, current PC stockpiles in the channel following leaner demand this year will shelter biz or retail customers from availability glitches until Q1 next year.

DRAM is likely to feel the strain of a slowing mobile PC market as "any reduction in PC sales due to supply constraints will further depress the already oversupplied DRAM market", said iSuppli.

Some camera makers – including Sony, Nikon and Canon – have been disrupted by the natural disaster in the Far East as have car makers, with Ford, Mazda, Hino, Honda, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota suspending production in Thailand.

my ext hard drive whirrs and clicks and whirrs and clicks and whirrs and clicks and then stops, and my laptop won't recognise it. this is death, yes? is it gonna cost me absolute £££s to get the data off of it?

oh noooooooooooo

that happened to me two weeks ago (my entire music collection on it). took it to friend-of-friend who said he could do cheap data recovery and it looked really hopeful and then the next day he called to say he couldn't do it, i'd need to take it to a professional. we found a few data recovery places and about the best deal appeared to be "starting at £97, not more than £250". given that they seem to charge on the basis of quantity and obv a music collection is massive, that's the point at which i decided it would be "liberating" to start again. it has indeed been partially liberating but it is also the closest i have come to weeping in a decade

yikes - that's definitely the nightmare, lex... i think i would weep too.

however, i have just discovered that it was my old, broken HD that i was using, and that my newer, still-functioning hd was in another moving box and appears to be doing okay. phew. should probably back that sucker up asap, though...

OK, so what's the most reliable way to automatically back up your music as you go along? My external hard drive was broken by an energy surge after a power cut and I recovered 100% of it but it was frighteningly expensive. Does anyone here use double drives?

I have my music library on my internal drive as well as backed up to an external drive. Plus the contents are on various removable devices as well. Depending on how big your library is you'd be well served using Google Music or Amazon's cloud service.

What if you're talking terabytes?

i have a dual-bay NAS set up as RAID 1 (translation = a networked external drive with TWO hard drives in it, which are exact copies, and which appear on your computer as one drive. if one drive fails, you already have an exact copy of it. howvwrr, if you get some kind of data corruption, that corruption is also copied...... so really i need to be backing those up to Time Machine or something)

ned, i'll send you an external drive, copy yer music on to it and i'll keep a back up here in the UK. kthx

ned for truly huge needs you can get, say, a three or five-bay NAS and set it up as one of the other flavors of RAID. the whole enchilada will appear as one humongous networked drive. and then of course for safety's sake you get the exact same setup again, and back everything up to that on a daily or weekly basis

Mine keep dying, it's a drag. Seems to be the essential ones that do it too.
Think I've just lost load s of VU & Sun Ra
not what the thread's about but, wah.

xpost -- sounds involved but worth it, of course. Pricing is obviously my key concern. (Keep in mind that I'm planning on a computer upgrade later in the year, so that has priority.)

This is intriguing.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/29/connected-data-transporter-sync/

Am trying to make my internal SSD as slim as possible. Current hurdle: iPhoto library.

ew