My Western Digital (My Book) external hard drive just went bad. (USB/Firewire)
It's only about 1-1/2 years old. I'll be needing another External & was wondering what other folks use.
This is really disappointing. I have/had ALL my music on it.
Thanks in advance.
Mick
Very scarry. I have the same thing.
Actually have two 500 G Western Digital (My Books). One is about 1 1/2 years old and the other abut 2 months. Since one is mainly backup I have been thinking of disconnecting it when not in use (which is most of the time). The other is BIAB 2009 exclusively.
I have a Seagate Free Agent Pro-750G, that I've had no problems with. I have the content of my laptop on the Seagate, including BIAB. Later, Ray
Hey Mick,
I can´t recommend Lacie enough! I´ve had my 1 TB external Lacie for 3 years now. I take it all over the place, use it while I´m working on Cruise ships pretty much all over the world. I haven´t had 1 issue, ever. I´ve heard of lots of other musicians who have had issues with Western Digital drives. Seagate is also good, in fact, I´m not sure if this is true, but I´ve heard that Lacie uses Seagate drives and their own enclosure.
Having said that, I´m reading now where a lot of Music pros are starting to use SSD drives. What I´m hearing is that because there is no spinning platter, your data is much safer. The down side right now is cost, although that too is set to change soon.
My last advice: Multiple copies of your Back Ups!!! I´ve learned the hard way.
Help this helps,
Ed
Acapulco
Don't give up on it unless and until you remove the drive itself from the USB cradle and either hook it up inside another or hook it up inside the computer and see if the drive actually works.
A friend of mine thought the drive was dead, turned out to be the electronics inside the USB box. His drive was fine. Mac to the rescue one mo' time.
--Mac
Thanks for the input guys!
I've always been partial to Seagate myself. My first computer had a Seagate 240 MB!!!
Mac...
I don't know anymore...
You are from Earth right?
It appears as though there was a loose connection inside the enclosure.
(At least I hope that's it!)
It seems to be working okay now. ("he said trepidly with his fingers crossed")
In any event, I'm also going to get another external drive, maybe 2.
I'll keep ya' posted.
Mick
I own a Lacie 500 gb. Great hard drive, no problems hauling from gig to gig. Even dropped it once and still works fine ( Although I do not recomend dropping, it causes heart palputations!).
G'day Ed,
Quote:
Having said that, I´m reading now where a lot of Music pros are starting to use SSD drives. What I´m hearing is that because there is no spinning platter, your data is much safer. The down side right now is cost, although that too is set to change soon.
Another down side is read/write cycles - they don't have anything like the capacity of a spinning platter for read/write cycles and so the NVRAM eventually dies. Your data isn't actually safer at all. Still, they're getting better almost daily... For mine, I'd use an SSD for lower power consumption, less heat, no noise and speed but NOT reliability over the long term - if you use one: BACK IT UP!
G'day Mick,
Quote:
I've always been partial to Seagate myself. My first computer had a Seagate 240 MB!!!
I like Seagates, though my very first HDD was a 5 MB TEAC which I thought was amazing ('till then I'd been using 360k 5 1/4" floppies), then I added another 5MB - this one was an NEC. When I got my first 20 (NEC), then a 40 MB (Seagate) I was nearly in heaven. The first Novell server I managed had 2*300 MB ESDI drives (NEC) in a software mirror - heady stuff! And not really so long ago - the server was in 1987 (or maybe '88)
Man oh man. I read this thread on Monday, my external drive died on Tuesday. I had just bought a new Seagate 750gig external but haven't set it up yet and was about to start transferring stuff but first I wanted to clear some space from my internal E drive so just last week I moved over 100 gigs from the E drive to this now dead external 250 gig. Just last week! Aarggh! It included all my backup live recording session files. I read Mac's tip so I pulled the drive, put it into my tower and nothing, then put it into another external case and nothing. The only way my system at least sees the drive is in it's original firewire case. The drive will then show up in "my computer" as a G drive but I can't access it. It says the file or directory is corrupted. The good news is I took it to my nephew's house where he has every piece of software known to man I think and he fired up Easy Recovery Pro and viola everything is there and I copied it all over to another external. That program is about $100 or so. Best guess is my File Allocation Table got corrupted and that can happen a number of ways, a power fluctuation, a virus or just some glitch in the system. Later, I'm going to see if the drive can be fully restored but for now at least I got all my data copied off. Whew!
Bob
I have an 'Iomega' that works great. But don't buy another 'My Book' unless you check about the 'sleep' feature on them. I have one and it's working OK except for the 'sleep' on it. It goes to sleep after a certain length of time and then has to wake up each time I want to access it or save something. Drives me crazy. Wasn't aware of it when I bought it. I contacted support and they said that the sleep allows the drive to last longer and there's nothing that can be done. I was going to send it back but waited too long and now I'm stuck with it. Thanks for the reminder to back up my data on these imperfect machines.
I have a My Book which is hooked up to my keyboard. It runs and runs and runs. I have a LaCie 250GB in the Porsche case, and guess what, it's a Western Digital drive. I have a 750G Free Agent that I have set up as e-sata which I was using for backups. I should have used it as an intermediary when I was moving files from my old computer to the new one, because somehow or another, I've lost all my documents, music, pictures, etc. I've purchased, and am using now Stellar's Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software, with the hopes that I'll be able to find the deleted files on the old hard drive. If not that, then I'm going to have to look on a partition on one of the drives in the new computer, and hope I can recover it from there. Very slow going, the recovery software has been running for 10 and a half hours, and hasn't completed half of the drive yet.
Gary
And, after almost 24 hours of running, I still have not completed the scan on a 320GB drive. Thank God I didn't have it on a Terrabyte drive.
Gary
Here's my advice - based on years of experience.
You can buy any drive as long as it has the words Seagate written on it.
I'm not too sure about that, Cardinal. While the Seagates I've bought have been okay, I remember a time when they were failing out of the box. Also, depending on the model, there have been some very bad reviews on certain Seagate models on Newegg. I like my Free Agent drive, I use them at work for backup, and I have Seagates in our file server RAID array, and like them.
For my latest build, I went with Western Digital. I've always had good luck with WD drives.
Gary
G'day Gary,
Quote:
I'm not too sure about that, Cardinal. While the Seagates I've bought have been okay, I remember a time when they were failing out of the box. Also, depending on the model, there have been some very bad reviews on certain Seagate models on Newegg. I like my Free Agent drive, I use them at work for backup, and I have Seagates in our file server RAID array, and like them.
For my latest build, I went with Western Digital. I've always had good luck with WD drives.
WRT the Seagates failing out of the box, I can't help wondering... Some years back I started refusing to accept machines from our suppliers that were equipped with Quantum HDDs. Then Quantum sold it's HDD arm to Maxtor - and again I refused to accept machines with Maxtor drives - in both cases the failure rate was far too high - greater than 10% within warranty period and approaching 50% within 1 year of end of warranty. Guess maybe that's why Quantum got out of the HDD business. Their TBUs are very good! We specified either IBM or Seagate drives until about 12 month before IBM sold their drives to Hitachi (IBM had let quality deteriorate and reliability had become an issue) wherefore we dropped IBM and specified Seagates only. We tried Hitachi's for a while but were dissatisfied with reliability and performance.
Anyhow, to continue, a couple of years ago Seagate acquired Maxtor... It seemed to me that some of the Seagate models were simply Quantum and Maxtor models that had been rebadged, though I also read that Seagate had closed the acquired fabrication plants so I don't really know what was being shipped under what label there for a while.
Perhaps the Seagates with the bad reviews were really not Seagates at all..?
For my customers, we generally prefer Seagates. The only reason WD's are not as high on our preference list is simply performance - Seagate has faster standard drives (yes, I know, WD have some 10,000 RPM drives that are very fast but these are not their basic drives)
If you ask enough people, you will get horror stories about every manufacturer. For what its worth, we prefer to sell HP servers - IMHO they are without out peer in their storage subsystems and their Smart Array Controllers are simply the best in the world - bar none. HP currently use Seagate and WD drives in their servers - and have done for many years - this says a lot to me.
Every doggone one of 'em regardless of brand, are made in Singapore.
It is shared technology and give or take a few things, the quality level is about the same for all as far as durability concerns go.
Frankly, the terms, "durability" and "hard drive" should obviously be mutually exclusive.
I'd venture to say that the majority of hard drive failures are not due to hardware faults but to internal software probs. Unless you crash a head or the like.
It is a wonder that the things work at all.
Regardless of where they were designed, where manufactured or who manufactured them.
Failure is to be expected.
Backup accordingly.
--Mac
I recently purchased a 500GB Maxtor external hard drive from Walmart for $90 USD. The major concern for me was the warranty. I purchased this one because it has a 5-year warranty while others had 1 to 3 year warranties.
I still back everything up on archival CD’s though.
G'day Mac,
Quote:
Every doggone one of 'em regardless of brand, are made in Singapore.
It is shared technology and give or take a few things, the quality level is about the same for all as far as durability concerns go.
Almost but not quite - regardless, they aren't all made in the same plants. Samsung make drives in Korea IIRC, and I've seen a few "no-names" from India. Not sure where Fujitsu and Hitachi are making theirs these days (Hitachi took over IBM's drives - they used to be made by Seagate, but I think Hitachi make their own now - not sure where)
Quote:
I'd venture to say that the majority of hard drive failures are not due to hardware faults but to internal software probs. Unless you crash a head or the like.
When we see what we call a HD failure, it is the HDD. Sometime the logic board, sometimes a chamber failure of some kind... Remember the Quantum "fireball"? They were well named - saw more than I care to count go up in a cloud of sparks and smoke - they had a hybrid chip on board for the platter motor control which used to regularly blow itself apart.
Maxtor's had a habit of running too hot, usually resulting in a chamber failure - Quantums also often had chamber failures though usually for different reasons. Seen lots of "dropped" heads (actually, the "slipper" comes adrift and the head is allowed to contact the surface - very noisy...)
Quote:
It is a wonder that the things work at all.
Regardless of where they were designed, where manufactured or who manufactured them.
Failure is to be expected.
Backup accordingly.
Better advice was never uttered.
Mario:
When you store your CDRW or DVDRW or whatever you use, store 'em in a cool, dry, dark place - this media doesn't last nearly as long as the manufacturers would like us to believe.
What I wrote is based on firsthand experience in a clean room, where we used to exchange disk platters in an effort to recover data.
While I did indeed find many drives with mechanical/electrical failures, I found many more at that time that were wrecked due to viruses like the older "Korean" varieties that merely wipe out Track Zero and things like that, which to the user would likely get blamed on something else due to the way the drive acts. There also exist bad codes that will crash heads. That one looks like a hardware fault to the uninitiated. Be careful with your disk swap cure because many are trojan-like and will be lurking to trash the replacement drive's data at a later time, too. -- Which leads to users hating one brand of disk, of course. They can indeed write code that can trash hardware.
--Mac
G'day Mac,
your comments are appreciated, but with all due respect, we haven't been fooled into suspecting a faulty HDD by a software cause in many, many years...
As for disliking one brand of HDD WRT another - fault rates speak for themselves - I have reported what we have seen, not bias - the only bias I admit to is being highly suspicious of m$...
Which reminds me, Mario - I'd guess that despite what the label says, your Maxtor is probably a Seagate drive. I'm pretty sure that when Seagate acquired Maxtor they shut down the old Quantum and Maxtor factories... Though they did run out the old stock.
Quote:
G'day Mac,
your comments are appreciated, but with all due respect, we haven't been fooled into suspecting a faulty HDD by a software cause in many, many years...
Just tell me how you proof that first.
See, If I write malicious code that even just overly taxes the drive to the point that hardware fails, it would be easy to assume that to be a hardware failure, but not good forensics.
--Mac
Quote:
See, If I write malicious code that even just overly taxes the drive to the point that hardware fails, it would be easy to assume that to be a hardware failure, but not good forensics.
Don't need to write anything - Windows already does that by itself...
More seriously though, it would be a hardware failure - software cause I admit, but still a hardware failure, and our customers would likely see degradation in performance* and ask us to fix it before the drive actually failed - however, the only arguments that I can reasonably give to counter that particular scenario are:
a) We don't get "repeat failures". Either your putative code never made it to the new drive OR it never existed... We very often are able to recover data from failing drives and clone 'em before they actually fail completely. If the customer gets here soon enough we usually save everything - the new drives will be clones of the failed ones 'cos that saves enormous amounts of time, and therefore money, and gets our customers systems into a known state. We always perform malware scans to make as sure as we possibly can that no systems go back out the door with malware still installed.
b) Please give me an example of such code "in the wild", I'm not aware of any but then I don't know everything either. That said, these days the vast majority (perhaps all) of malicious code is looking to extract data, not break things.
c) Why would such code be HDD brand specific? We see less Seagate's and WD's fail than anything else. Amongst the big names, our current contender for highest failure rates is Fujitsu, followed by Toshiba. That's not to say they're bad, they just happen to fail a little more often.
Anything is possible, but not everything is probable.
*actually, thinking about it - most of them wouldn't - we see some dreadfully poor performing systems that some fairly simple clean-ups make enormous differences to.
This open forum is decidedly NOT the place to discuss or reveal such info.
--Mac
Mac, you’re probably right in that the drive is a Seagate. I just reported what was on the label and the fact I bought by warranty and not name brand. I’ve used this philosophy for years now and I’ve had excellent using warranty times as my main criteria when purchasing hard drives.
Lawrie, I know the CDs don’t last as long as advertised but thanx for bringing that up. I doubt very much there will be a CD player 200 years from now anyway! I have lost data in as little as two months using cheap CDs for archival purposes. So now I only used the archival gold CDs, burning at a very slow rate then verify said burn.
Lawrie,
What software would you recommend to attempt to recover data from a deleted partition, or an overwritten partition? There are many software companies that claim it can be done, but I'm not having a lot of success with the software I bought, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery.
Any suggestion would be appreciated.
All hard drives are healthy and running well, I just overwrote, or deleted the partition in my stupidity.
Gary
G'day Gary,
to recover trashed partition tables or deleted partitions, we find that the Norton tools work fairly well. On occasion we have had to resort to another tool called Active@ which we downloaded from the net for a modest fee. It's been very good.
We aren't in the game of trying to recover from overwritten partitions/disks. That's out of our league entirely, we don't own an electron microscope...
In general, deleted or damaged partition tables usually recover OK. A partition that's actually been overwritten is, for all practical purposes, gone.
Our primary requirement is to recover data from failing drives. For the most part we find Norton Ghost - with the correct parameters selected in order to do a sector copy - does this tolerably well. It's not uncommon to take a week on a really bad drive and still get everything although we also get drives that simply won't recover. (Dead is dead unless the platter is OK and you have clean room facilities etc..) Of course, we have systems sitting on the bench setup just for this task. Ghost is NOT installed on the PC, we boot from the Ghost CD and run the character based version - better options. Note that the very latest version no longer has this capability so when we start running into file systems that our current version doesn't understand we'll need to go looking for something else - probably something on a live CD I'd guess.
In the end, it depends what our customers are willing to pay for - time is money and some of these recovery processes take time (I.e. technician labour actually doin' stuff, not the above mentioned PC chugging away for a week or so). Those that can afford the really labour intensive recoveries don't need 'em - they do proper backups...
I'm sure some people have had good luck with LaCie -- but I've just had two LaCie 500 GB drives fail, both of which are a couple of years old. Being the curious type, I opened the external metal enclosures. I was surprised to find that each of the 500GB drives actually consisted of two 250 GB drives (no wonder the external cases were so big and heavy). I was even more surprised to find that inside one of the enclosures were two drives from Western Digital; the other enclosure had two IBM drives. We're talking about the same LaCie model here, identical except for drives from different manufacturers. I also discovered through further testing that all of these drives actually still worked -- it was the LaCie enclosure that went bad.
I've also had bad luck with Seagate (had an external drive that would make a weird tapping noise, then freeze; sent it in to Seagate under warranty after owning it just over 30 days, and got back a replacement drive with exactly the same problem -- and a $25 service charge. Seagate had promised not to bill my credit card, but did anyway, and it took another month to straighten that out.) I'm sure someone has a horror story about every manufacturer, but I can see no reason to buy a drive from LaCie, since they don't really make drives -- might as well just ask for whatever's behind "door number two." And Seagate won't get a third chance to give me a drive that doesn't work. I do own at least half a dozen internal and external drives from Western Digital, and none have given me problems -- yet.