View Full Version : Late-Night Musings on Hard Drive Reliability
amateriat
05-23-2010, 01:03
Well, I'm up this late (4:20AM EST) because, several hours ago, one of the four internal hard drives in my late-model Power Mac G4 tower started coughing up a hairball or two. It's the second-oldest drive in there, and was slated for replacement mid-summer, but it's acting like it wants out now. It's rather inconvenient, because I'm in the middle of recovering data from the hard drives of two clients, one of whose drives is in truly dire straits (I'll likely have to leave it on for a bunch of hours in the hope that it'll mount: I'm getting some sleep in order to get to the RFf NYC meet-up later in today).
I've watched a lot of drives self-destruct over the last year. Here are a few back-of-the-envelope observations:
- Maxtor drives truly, honestly bite. I used to gripe about older Seagate HDs prematurely croaking, but Maxtors seem hearty if they make it past two years of age. I've already had to deal with two 750GB externals getting funky; I was able to save one, while the other one is here in Tiny Atelier, making ominous clicking noises.
- S.M.A.R.T. technology is stupid. Of all the dead-or-near-dying HDs I've come across, I'd say about 15% displayed failing SMART status on diagnosis. The others clicked, clacked, wheezed and shuddered without SMART showing a peep o' trouble. This is supposed to be an early-warning system in the event of impending doom. This dog hardly has a pulse, let alone hunts.
- I've had an semi-official policy of replacing hard drives after 3.5 to 4 years' use. I'm rather tempted to pull that back to 2.5-3 years, which I'll also be recommending to my clients, who likely won't be thrilled with the news. Between vastly-increased capacity and commodity-cheap prices, I'm wondering what the QC on these drives is like now, compared with 5-6 years ago. Maybe those "enterprise-class" drives are screwed together better, and with better components? (The MTBF specs are better, for what that's worth.)
- I've seen a fair number of fried power adapters for external drives lately, including my own 1TB LaCie NAS drive that backs up all the computers in the household. I'm thinking even good-quality "protected" power strips aren't enough. Time for a UPS, maybe?
- By process of elimination, I'm using only Western Digital drives now...in the tower, in the PowerBook, as an external drive for the tower (2TB Studio drive), in the small portable drives I carry on my tech gigs. No surprises in the three years I've been using them. (The one internal drive giving me hiccups is–you guessed it, a 300GB Maxtor.)
- Maxtor was absorbed by Seagate some time back. Misery loves company?
- The Maxtor gets replaced with a 500GB WD next week. (PATA...yes, it's the "old" ATA, but I'm not in the mood to buy a SATA card for the G4 at the moment, as I only have one PCI slot left in the Mac, and I'm saving it for something else...)
- If you shoot digital, make sure you actually transferred your images, intact, to your Main Iron's HD before triple-formatting your card and sticking it back in your camera. A client of mine didn't, and I couldn't get his images back from the card for love or money. Just one reason I still shoot film at least 75% of the time. Film ain't perfect here, either, but I prefer the odds.
- When you install a hard drive in anything, make a note of the purchase and installation date. Keep it in a handy place.
- Don't operate high-current-draw equipment (i.e. vacuum-cleaners) while your computer is in the process of a mission-critical chore, especially if the equipment is on the same line. Do not ask me how I know this.
- Run disk-checks at least every other week.
- If you insist, look into off-site storage such as Mozy or the like. Unless you have Synchronous DSL (or its cable-borne equivalent), brace yourself for some long backup times the first time out. I prefer the idea of a monthly backup on an external drive, then dropping it into a safe-deposit box not too far away. But that's just me.
- Trust me about the SMART issue.
That's all, folks.
- Barrett
Use spinrite. Not only can it "fix" harddrives, it can keep them from going bad in the first place.
Roger Hicks
05-23-2010, 03:11
All my computers run on UPS, and my writing computers use solid-state storage rather than HD. Something that surprised me is that the UK has (or had) the most reliable power supply of anywhere I have lived, with rural France a (poor) second and rural California (Central Coast) a very significantly poorer third.
Cheers,
R.
amateriat
05-23-2010, 03:24
dfoo: I'll check SpinRite out. I use a few other recovery apps with varying success. I'm primarily a Mac user, but I do have a late-model HP tower running Vista Home Premium, so I can load and run SpinRite on that (good to know it'll handle Mac-formatted disks so long as I lash 'em to the HP). Thanks for the tip.
Roger: No, the grid here in the States isn't quite what it should be (or used to be, for that matter). Of course, the "mains" in my place is/are fairly reliable, allowing that the brownstone I'm living in was built sometime around 1895, with some of the original wiring (obviously installed a bit later) still intact and in use, though much of it, thankfully, has been replaced.
So, do you mean to tell me the electrics where you are now aren't exactly the best?
- Barrett
All hdd's are guaranteed to fail. It's just a matter of when. :(
I don't have much overlap between photography and computers fortunately, but nevertheless my home-built pc's all use RAID of some sort. I don't have a power-conditioner or UPS of any sort - that might be a good idea for the future, though it seems pretty reliable here. Except for that time half of holland was out, or when the local transformer leaked coolant and blew up etc. etc.
amateriat
05-23-2010, 03:58
Well, it looks like the drive simply has a few bad sectors, so I'm running an app to map them out (one sector was smack in the middle of an image file I dearly wanted to print, of course). I managed to copy everything else from that partition (I have four partitions on that drive) to an external drive temporarily. Two of the remaining three partitions, including my large-ish iTunes collection, were automatically backed up earlier as a matter of course.
Now I'll try and catch a bit of sleep while the Mac dukes it out with that misbehaving drive. Thankfully, the RFf meet-up isn't until a bit before 3, so I can get a bit of shut-eye in.
- Barrett
I got tired of all the USB drives and limitations of simple NAS devices and decided to try a Windows Home Server running on a UPS. So far it has been great.
It has very efficient , raid-like data replication across multiple drives using any size drives (like JBOD), Shadow coping of files for version history, and automatic monitoring and nightly backups of all machines on your network - if your virus software is out of date or a backup hasn't completed for a number of days, you will see a tray alert on every machine. There is a healthy cottage industry for plugins - for media streaming, managing the box and UPS email warnings, etc. I do backup the data on the WHS to a separate USB drive.
The only downside for me is that I built mine from scratch and it can't integrate my Mac seamlessly. If you buy an HP WHS, they have Mac compatible client software to automatically backup Macs.
My other seriously considered option was a DROBO, but the WHS has much greater capabilities, is faster, and cheaper implement.
In my experience spinrite will recover your drive, unless the drive has had some sort of mechanical failure. If you run spinrite in maintenance mode, it will keep the drives in good shape by scanning every sector of the drive thereby "refreshing" the data. I know it sounds magical, but there are good technical reasons why that is a good idea :)
Roger Hicks
05-23-2010, 04:33
dfoo: I'll check SpinRite out. I use a few other recovery apps with varying success. I'm primarily a Mac user, but I do have a late-model HP tower running Vista Home Premium, so I can load and run SpinRite on that (good to know it'll handle Mac-formatted disks so long as I lash 'em to the HP). Thanks for the tip.
Roger: No, the grid here in the States isn't quite what it should be (or used to be, for that matter). Of course, the "mains" in my place is/are fairly reliable, allowing that the brownstone I'm living in was built sometime around 1895, with some of the original wiring (obviously installed a bit later) still intact and in use, though much of it, thankfully, has been replaced.
So, do you mean to tell me the electrics where you are now aren't exactly the best?
- Barrett
Dear Barrett,
Not as such.
'As such' was a phrase in common use at ICL (Internatonal Computers Limited, the leading UK mainframe computer company) when I worked there in the early 80s, as in, "Can you run this under VME/K?" -- "Not as such." (i.e. 'at all'). Actually the house wiring, probably installed between 1945 and 1990 in a house built and subsequenty modified between maybe 1400 and 1975, is not too bad (though woefully inadequate in extent). But power cuts and brownouts are several more common than in the UK, though several times more reliable than California.
Cheers,
R.
marcr1230
05-23-2010, 05:13
Multiple backups - I use Time Capsule - which IMHO sucks due to the sparse bundle file system, but hasn't failed on me lately. I also make rsync copies of my home directory and archive off items that take too much space and I never use (once watched shows and movies). if a drive starts making funny sounds - back it up immediately , refined hearing has saved me a couple times.
All my drives are WD, wouldn't have any other brand. My main workstation has two 8-year old WD drives in it, yes I have backup - I use Retrospect - great program. I just replaced a croaked IBM Travelstar 30GB in a laptop that had been hammered for seven years with a $70 160GB WD drive. Wonder how long that's going to last? Not seven years I bet.
blackwave
05-23-2010, 07:39
I have no idea what you guys are talking about. However, I like pie and Xtol. Carry on!
Roger Hicks
05-23-2010, 08:36
Two nations divided by a common language...
Pies in the UK are normally savoury and have either a top and a bottom crust or just a top crust. A pork pie with mustard and a mug of cider is a particular delight. Of course there are sweet pies too (e.g. blackberry and apple) but they still have a top crust.
Pies in the USA would usually be called tarts in English (being open faced, with a bottom crust only) and are often inedibly sweet unless you were brought up eating them.
Then again, proper mustard is, indeed, hot as mustard. American mustard, by contrast, is commonly sweet as custard.
Cheers,
R.
batterytypehah!
05-23-2010, 09:28
Two nations divided by a common language...
Pies in the UK are normally savoury and have either a top and a bottom crust or just a top crust. A pork pie with mustard and a mug of cider is a particular delight. Of course there are sweet pies too (e.g. blackberry and apple) but they still have a top crust.
Pies in the USA would usually be called tarts in English (being open faced, with a bottom crust only) and are often inedibly sweet unless you were brought up eating them.
Then again, proper mustard is, indeed, hot as mustard. American mustard, by contrast, is commonly sweet as custard.
Roger, it's not nearly as "simple" as that! Where I live, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_cream_pie is a pie -- and where Barrett lives, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_pie is. :D
imokruok
05-23-2010, 09:31
Lots of great tips here. Yes, SMART is generally not very helpful. I mainly use its protocol for reading the temperature off of the drive to make sure nothing is wildly out of whack. If I have two of the same drives in a case and one is at 37C and the other is at 50C, something's going on with the drive or the air circulation.
Personal experience, I only go three years on a drive. The drive in my Thinkpad made it only two...it started getting read/write errors, and I was lucky enough to image it in entirety to a new drive.
Internet backup is not feasible for me as it would take forever on my 1mbit upload limit. So I do whole image backups to a local drive every week or so. I really like the process, as it's about the fastest to get you up and running again if you have a problem. Drive failure? Just pull the drive, put in a new one, copy the backup image to the new drive and you're up and running. I like Acronis, but there are other image programs out there, including native ones in Win7.
FYI I have had 3 western digital drives die on me within the last two years. They always seem to die fast. I only use the seagates now and had great luck with maxtors. In fact the first "upgrade" maxtor 40 gb HDD I bought for my old 533mhz Celeron way back in the day still works! Its at least 7-8 years old now...
Roger Hicks
05-23-2010, 11:12
Roger, it's not nearly as "simple" as that! Where I live, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_cream_pie is a pie -- and where Barrett lives, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_pie is. :D
Ah, but a pizza is in fact a savoury tart. Or, depending on the ingredients and cooks, an unsavoury tart.
@ Doublenegative: My father's younger sister, my aunt Margaret, was actually known as Fanny as a young woman. When my parents were married in '48, she was a very tall teenager, and my war-widow grandmother was reportedly heard to say mournfully, "Where am I going to find a man big enough for my Fanny?"
Then there's a grower of herbs in France, selling their produce under the name of "Le Jardin de Fanny" (Fanny's garden).
Cheers,
R.
I like pie! (http://www.weebls-stuff.com/wab/pie/) :DMe too! Steak & kidney is my absolute fave! :D Pie & peas, pint of Guinness, now there's a real meal!
amateriat
05-24-2010, 00:03
FYI I have had 3 western digital drives die on me within the last two years. They always seem to die fast. I only use the seagates now and had great luck with maxtors. In fact the first "upgrade" maxtor 40 gb HDD I bought for my old 533mhz Celeron way back in the day still works! Its at least 7-8 years old now...
I guess it just goes to show: I've seen virtually every brand of hard drive go bellyu-up at some time or other, and, as MartinP put it, they'll all croak sooner or later. It's just that, strictly from my experience, WD's drives have worked out better. Seagate also had a rash of bum 500GB drives that Apple spec'd for the previous-generation iMacs, and caused a lot of hoots n' hollers in the Internets. (If I had $10 for every time I had to explain "Apple didn't make those drives, Seagate did", I'd be close to owning a loaded Mac Pro right now.)
I did have a 160GB Maxtor that seemed well-nigh indestructible for a while...
- Barrett
pkreyenhop
05-24-2010, 01:28
Roger, this must be the funniest story on RFF ever!
Cheers
Peter
Richard Ross
05-24-2010, 01:53
Years ago there was an English TV chef called Fanny Craddock. She had a weekly show with husband Johnny, who once uttered the immortal words "tune in next week when you can see how to make donuts like Fanny's" ...
Richard
There was a good point made about using workstation grade disk-drives. Remember that most pre-built computers are built down to a price and many disk-drive manufacturers have a double range, or at least some cheaper models, to get in to that mass market while having a guarantee of only months or a year.
It is always a prudent plan to seek out and buy from the range of drives with a longer warranty and higher quality - even if they might be more conservative (ie.slower or smaller) in design.
Rsync gets my vote too btw. :)
Frank Petronio
05-24-2010, 03:35
I can't believe you wouldn't use a UPS in Brooklyn! Start there.
Personally I just buy a new external Firewire HD every year, backing up my daily stuff onto this year and last year's drives. The two and three year old drives hold less up to date but contain crucial archival back-ups off site.
I just buy consumer level externals. I have grown to distrust LaCies and favor WD MyBooks. $224 for a 2tb w Firewire 800 -- about the same as what the 1tb cost last year. Right now I back up 900gb, so at this schedule I should have twin 2 tb drives when I crest the 1 tb threshold at the end of this year.
Laptop HD prices have plummeted so I am swapping out my MacBook Pro's 120 gb for 500 gb, putting the old 120 gb into a cheap USB external case. I'll take this and another small external on road trips for BU.
Trying Time Machine next, at least for my wife's computer.
I have tried Image Shelter for online management, rationalizing it made more sense than using endless external drives, but it is SLOW and the policies and viability of these companies can change things at anytime, as I sadly learned after spending two weeks setting myself up to sell Stock via Image Shelter only to have them pull the plug on that aspect of their venture with only a couple weeks warning.
Finally, part of the reason I post a lot of photos here and a few other sites is because if the worst happened, I'd still be able to pull enough 600-pixel images to make a useful online portfolio ;-)
oftheherd
05-24-2010, 04:44
UPS is always a good idea. Make sure (as I think most are now) it is one that runs off the battery at all times. Strips may OK if they have the proper components, and you can get inside to replace failed or damaged components after a lightning strike. They help with transients from things like vacumn cleaners, but not completely. The UPS with a large battery is better.
Be careful of flash drives. They will probably go bad with use faster than a hard drive, even those which have a technology to randomize the memory locations used.
Between my business and home I'm running close to twenty computers and many TB of drives. I will not buy Maxtor and have concluded that enterprise level Western Digital drives are my best bet and all critical information is backed-up by three separate software programs with two on-site and one off-site. I have had many drives fail without warning and have had two backups overwritten when employees try to recover their own mistakes and end up making things much worse. One important tip; always have one backup that nobody, but you knows about.
Benjamin Marks
05-24-2010, 06:02
Hard-drive gurus: I have been running weekly backups to an internal drive and monthly back-ups to an external drive that just sits, unpowered when not in use. Every six months, a large drive goes to an off site location. I'm generating between 750 GB and 1 TB per year in data, so this has been a relatively inexpensive way to keep things backed up. Am I correct in assuming that MTBF numbers are for hours when the drive is actually running?
BTW: in Vermont, with country-DSL the "cloud" might as well be the Small Magellanic Cloud for all I have access to it.
oftheherd
05-24-2010, 06:20
Just me, but I don't think public cloud; or even commercial has acheived the security needed.
What manner of trust? If the issue is trust not to use/read the data then encrypt it.
ErnestoJL
05-24-2010, 09:36
Back in 1996 when a 3.6 Gb drive was a real big one, I bought a couple of Seagates. S/N were about 50 units apart on each other. They died in 2006 one week apart from each other. They were replaced with a single one of 80 Gb (Samsung) which died four years later, Didnīt mind just because was a drive a friend of mine used for backing up customer drives, and BTW it was a gift.
My Toshiba laptop came with a Toshiba Phillipines made 40Gb drive which lasted about two years. It was replaced by a 160 Gb Samsung about a year ago. This drive crashed three weeks before today, so Iīm looking for a decent replacement.
Wonder if any of the present drives on the market would perform as those old Seagates I had, even having no blackouts nor brownouts since the last ten years here.
Today I decided that all my picture files (and other important files) will be saved on 4GB (or bigger) SD cards. Those that can be read by any home computer.
Wonder if any of those cards would last as old negs I have, some more than 50 years old.
Ernesto
Frank Petronio
05-24-2010, 09:51
I don't see where the flash cards are so reliable - they are just faster and more expensive. They may withstand shock better, but digital photographers have their cards - SD and CF - fail all the time.
imokruok
05-24-2010, 10:00
I don't see where the flash cards are so reliable - they are just faster and more expensive. They may withstand shock better, but digital photographers have their cards - SD and CF - fail all the time.
Absolutely true, and acute failure is only one way they can die. Data retention in solid state memory still isn't very good. I mentioned in a similar thread a few months back that people are starting to test data that was stored on some of the original SSDs 4-5 years ago. It's full of errors. In contrast, I can still pull Word files off of a SCSI hard drive that was in my Mac 20+ years ago.
wgerrard
05-24-2010, 12:12
Two nations divided by a common language...
Pies in the UK are normally savoury and have either a top and a bottom crust or just a top crust. A pork pie with mustard and a mug of cider is a particular delight. Of course there are sweet pies too (e.g. blackberry and apple) but they still have a top crust.
R.
For some reason, apple pie over here almost always has a top crust, and is often quite thick. Suspect it's due to German influence. Fruit pies usually don't, and strawberry pie is often just a big pile of strawberries and sweet red gelation thrown into a crust and smothered with whipped cream. Hardly merits being called pie or tart, but if the strawberries are actually ripe, it's good.
Speaking of sweet, I bought a bourbon chocolate pecan pie not long ago. A guaranteed sugar high.
I seem to recall the UK lacks in the cookie department.
The great thing about HDD failures: you learn to notice the signs and recognize which you can live with for a little longer and which require an immediate newegg purchase.
My $.02 is that it also makes a good case for a bootable linux OS of some sort. Exceptionally good at reading data from otherwise challenged drives.
Bob Michaels
05-24-2010, 15:32
The aforementioned MFM/RLL drives are all but history.
If anyone has a mid-80's MFM 10 Mb hard drive for a IBM PC (ST225 or even a 125, as I remember) I would be interested. I upgraded mine to a RLL 20 Mb drive in the late 80's and would like to go back to the original.
I have a AST 640K memory expansion card, fully loaded with memory chips to trade. I will just take it back to the original 256K of memory that it came with.
Sorry I let the 8087 math co-processor chip go back back in the late 80's. But when someone offered me $100 for it, I could not refuse the money. I probably got 75 rolls of film with that $100.
Brian Sweeney
05-24-2010, 15:36
The St225 was a half-height, 20MByte drive. I thought RLL was 30MBytes. I think the last of my MFM drives packed it up. I had a 40MByte and 20MByte full-height for the longest time. I'll look in the basement.
I had a 5MByte FM drive for the microcomputers.
My oldest working hard drive at work is 1993. 1GByte. I keep two drives in the machine, back it up a good bit. The older, less dense drives are more reliable. I have a 1992 SCSI 2.5" notebook drive in the Kodak DCS200, 80MBytes. Holds 50 pictures. Still works.
Brian Sweeney
05-24-2010, 15:58
Nope- the ST225 is dead.
I do have some old stuff, a 1984 IBM Professional Graphics Controller, 640x480, 256 colors and the Monitor to go with it. $6K originally. Microsoft Word 6.0 for DOS. The oldest machine I keep running is a Pentium Pro with IDE drives, WIN95B. However, the Xerox 820-II with its 5.25" drives booted the last time I checked a few years ago. It is almost 30 years old. The Atari 400 still works.
Bob Michaels
05-24-2010, 16:15
Brian: you are probably right. Maybe it was the ST 125 that was the 10Mb drive. And the RLL drive was 30 mb. I have not booted the machine in decades. I cannot remember now if it came with a 10 Mb or 20 Mb drive. Who ever thought someone would ever need to store that much data anyway.
It was a strictly functional machine. No fancy RGB card and monitor, strictly monochrome.
If you come across a working 10Mb or 20 Mb drive, keep me in mind.
BTW, I do have shrink wrapped copy of DOS 2.3 to take it back to the original OS.
I have thrown away 286, 386 and 486 machines but kept this one because it is an original IBM. I was hoping that some day it may be worth something as a collector's item. But I don't think that has happened yet.
I have a Wang 8086 PC in my office. Much better machine... ;)
Damn, that was big bucks back in the day. My first PC had an 8086 with a turbo button. From 4.77 to 8Mhz! (not Ghz, Mhz). I later upgraded the memory to 640, and installed the math co-processor. Man, speed! Ironically enough, given the subject matter in this thread I later found out about HD failures, when the HD in that box (all 20M of it) failed and I lost all my data.
oftheherd
05-25-2010, 02:49
...
My $.02 is that it also makes a good case for a bootable linux OS of some sort. Exceptionally good at reading data from otherwise challenged drives.
My daughter's fiance told me he had a laptop in college that developed a hard drive problem, and began losing data and making noise. He switched to Linux and no more problems. And yes, the later versions of linux will read all MS disks, so a live distro for recovery is a good idea.
Bob Michaels
05-25-2010, 18:58
The only price I remember was a new Compaq portable (luggable) with not just 128k but a full 256K of memory, not one but two floppy disk drives and DOS 1.2. We got them for dealer cost which was $2,450 because we bought ten at one time.
No problems with hard drive failures since there was not one.
Thanks to Lotus 1-2-3, that was the biggest productivity boost for the money spent before or ever since. Hit the F9 (recalculate) key and in ten seconds it would do what used to take me a full day and several rolls of adding machine tape to do.
I believe this days decent Linux distros read AND write NTFS partitions (ntfs3g/fuse).
I do not believe Windows are so bad that HDD could not live with them, though revived under Linux :)
Backups are good idea, and I should rush to make one of my pictures.
My daughter's fiance told me he had a laptop in college that developed a hard drive problem, and began losing data and making noise. He switched to Linux and no more problems. And yes, the later versions of linux will read all MS disks, so a live distro for recovery is a good idea.
Bob Michaels
05-26-2010, 14:54
Well, my HDD for my system at work crashed today. It had been spinning for at least a year but we had a power outage overnight that drained every UPS and all systems shut down. Network / Server guru was out of town but I managed to get everything up and running, except my own system.
My computer would not boot but just emitted the clicking sound of HDD heads bouncing off the disk.
Fortunately all my data is on the server which is backed up in multiple places. But I spent the better part of the remaining day setting up a new system so I could go back to work at my regular job.
It made me check my desk drawer to insure the external HDD with the copy of the back up of my home system was still there. My home system is backed up to an internal HDD, a disconnected external HDD and another external HDD kept 20 miles away at the office.
I had a WD MyBook 500Gb external drive fail after around 2yrs. I'll see if a Linux machine can read it. Luckily I had mostly backed up to another external drive, but I still lost some images.
I'm running out of space now and was considering a Drobo, but maybe a more cost effective idea is to just buy a couple of 2Tb WD external drives. I use OSX and always use Lightroom to load new files onto 2 drives when uploading. This thread has been very informative.
Steve M.
07-12-2010, 19:28
I think you're on the right track sticking w/ WD. I have my photo files on my computer's internal HD, and on 2 backup external HD's (both WD). One of the drives is going on 6 years now, but still working like new. W/ triple redundancy I feel pretty safe, but will feel even better after I get all of my negs filed properly. At that point I don't care if all the hard drives fail because everything is going to be enlarger printed at that point, except for low rez web scans. It's taken me years to get to this point.
amateriat
07-12-2010, 20:53
Fred: I've seen all kinds of drives go belly-up in the past six months alone (around ten of 'em), including WD. Nonetheless, based on my before-mentioned "experience of averages", I'm trusting WD's before anyone else's for now. My main problem is selling more people on investing in a proper backup system, which truly costs chump-change right now.
And, IMO, I only see three somewhat-trustworthy companies making drives right now (WD, Hitachi, and Seagate, roughly in my own order of importance/trustworthiness).
(Damn...is this really my 4,200th post here?)
- Barrett
My HD quit in my laptop last month, good thing my most of my stuff was backed up. What are we all going to do in 40yrs to get all these photos off hard drives? Hope we can find a 40 year old PC to plug them all into that still works. It will be like tying to find a light bulb for your dads silde projector to see all your Kodachromes. Or your dads 8mm movies. What are we all going to do?
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