On Sep 14, 2010, at 3:53 AM, Paul Sargent wrote:
The question remains though, will whatever problem caused part of
the disk to go bad cause other areas to go bad too?
As you can't answer that I'd be getting another disk.
I can't back that advice up enough. You either aren't putting
important things on that drive, in which case, why store them, or they
are very important and you're taking a chance over $100. Back in the
"day" I could store all of my documents in a series of floppies. As
things grew, and technology grew, I could store them on zip disks,
which at one time I thought to be reliable. :) Later, CDs were viable.
Today, I'm less trusting of hard drives and long term media storage,
and I have more precious things than "documents", such as photos of
the entire life of my children. I have all of my stuff stored on two
drives (not RAID, since I don't trust software raid or cheap hardware
RAID). A script carefully analyzes the differences between the drives
I write too and the drives I backup too, and will halt and warn me if
there's too big of a difference which could mean I dumped a couple of
new movies on, or could mean something bad happened to my primary
drives. :) I then regularly backup to DVDs (personal documents) and
BluRay (music, movies, videos, etc).
I still worry. I have a couple of drives that I've replaced through
warranty, and a couple of drives that are sitting in a drawer that
were either out of warranty, or I couldn't convince the manufacturer
there was something wrong, but I get a corrupt file, or hear a strange
noise, and I pretend I had lit a $100 bill - I just don't risk my stuff.
At work, I'm a bit more casual, believe it or not. I'll reseat a drive
that blinks in one of our servers, and let the RAID array rebuild. The
difference there, is they are enterprise class drives, in an
enterprise hardware RAID solution, with nightly backups to tape,
offsite tapes, rotating tapes, monthly and annually stored tapes, plus
critical servers are imaged to another disk array for quick recovery
and we replicate more critical data over our WAN to an off-site data
center.
At home, with my cheap $100 to $200 SATA drives connected to a server
I built myself, with backup policies which are obviously far better
than most non-techies and far less than perfect, I take no chances.
It's like what they tell you with car seats... get in an accident,
throw the car seat away. Maybe it looks okay, who knows. To be honest,
for $150, is it worth it?
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