What to do about failed external hard drive

[Rob-F]

I have two Western Digital external drives for storing pictures. They have about 85% to 90% overlap in content, with each one backing up the other. The earlier one quit working. From Western Digital's website, it looks like they don't offer a repair service. However, they do mention that there are data recovery services (although WD doesn't seem to offer this).

Has anyone had any experience with data recovery? Or getting hard drives fixed? Where does one go for this?

[L David Tomei]

Yes, it happened to me and I just recovered. My Iomega 35194 fell off the desk and landed on the chair and quit working with most of my images. However, a friend transferred the data from the drive and now I have what I hope is a better drive that is more shock resistant.
The data can be recovered from the drive by anyone with a bit of computer knowledge (which I do not have). Good luck. BTW, I now have a 2 Tb LaCie external drive and I hope it's better.

[btgc]

Originally Posted by Tony Pio

BTW, I now have a 2 Tb LaCie external
drive and I hope it's better.

From I have learned LaCie isn't making HDD's, just cases or maybe simply picking third party made cases, disks and assembling them under their own name. Do not know how they gained popularity, maybe they get tested HDD's. Not putting down LaCie - just making clear you pay for design/name. And some people willingly do that; nothing wrong with them.

[rxmd]

Originally Posted by btgc

From I have learned LaCie isn't making HDD's, just cases or maybe simply picking third party made cases, disks and assembling them under their own name. Do not know how they gained popularity, maybe they get tested HDD's. Not putting down LaCie - just making clear you pay for design/name. And some people willingly do that; nothing wrong with them.

Their popularity is from when they started making pretty good and highly recognizable shock-resistant cases, which protect well against the "drop the drive off the table" scenario.

Nowadays I find the design a bit limiting (lugging around external cables and everything) while other manufacturers have caught up. I use a Buffalo Ministration Extreme now, which is a rugged USB 3.0 drive with a built-in cable.

Note that having more external drives or shock-resistant ones does not replace a backup solution. I have a little NAS device at home (an Excito B3) that doubles as a media server and does constant incremental backups to CrashPlan - Internet in Kyrgyzstan, amazingly enough, is good enough to permit that sort of thing - and I would feel a lot worse without it.

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Data recovery services can be VERY expensive, over $1000, if the drive failed mechanically. They disassemble the drive and remove the platters (the actual disks) in a clean room and put them in a working drive mechanism to recover the data. You want to have EVERYTHINg, 100% not 90%, backed up in duplicate, and better yet triplicate with at least one copy offsite, in another building, on the other side of town...in case your house burns down. Paranoid? Yep! But my archive drives have my life's work on them. They are literally worth EVERYTHING to me.

[L David Tomei]

Lacie makes external drives and the 2 tb got a good review on CNET... however, I can only hope it's good.
My bad drive was recovered by my wife's friend at her school and it wasn't difficult, but then I didn't do it. He also recovered an entire pair of drives on my old computer as well. Can't imagine why it would cost $1000 to do it.

[andersju]

Originally Posted by Tony Pio

Lacie makes external drives and the 2 tb got a good review on CNET... however, I can only hope it's good.
My bad drive was recovered by my wife's friend at her school and it wasn't difficult, but then I didn't do it. He also recovered an entire pair of drives on my old computer as well. Can't imagine why it would cost $1000 to do it.

Depends on the type of recovery needed. If it's "just" a corrupt file system, trashed partition table or something like that, some decent software might be enough. If it's a mechanical failure, it can get expensive, like Chris said.

But yeah, could also be the power supply, in which case there's nothing wrong at all with the actual HDD. For backups I have one of those SATA dock things, where you just insert an internal drive directly (both 2.5" and 3.5"). Saves space, fewer adapters/cables to keep track of.

[kuzano]

Originally Posted by Tony Pio

Lacie makes external drives and the 2 tb got a good review on CNET... however, I can only hope it's good.
My bad drive was recovered by my wife's friend at her school and it wasn't difficult, but then I didn't do it. He also recovered an entire pair of drives on my old computer as well. Can't imagine why it would cost $1000 to do it.

The majority of the time, drive failure is not complete. If it still spins up, the motor is working. If the shock did not cause the write/read heads to score one or more of the data platters (the original source of the term "hard drive crash"), then a reasonably astute tecnical person can simply hook the drive up to another computer and retrieve the data or other files from the drive. That's what your wife's friend did.

No, that is not worth $1000 and only takes a matter of minutes to see if it can be done.

As Chris noted, the $1000 price tag comes in when the motor in a hard drive fails completely and the drive does not spin up, as we say in techy words.

Then the drive must be competely disassembled and the platters moved into a bench drive that has the same motor and circuit board as the original. Being equipped to do that for all the drives out in the world is very costly and the process is time consuming. It also requires a very expensive environment (clean room and hair nets and such). That is costly.

However in many companies, corporations and banks, or where the livelihood of a person depends on the drive contents, the price is small at $1000.

Most failures, as I said before are not total drive failures. You often get warnings of impending failure. However a total drive crash gives no warning and is instantaneous. It is simpy a mechanical failure of the drive. Dropping a drive from a few feet up to a concrete surface can cause slow impending failure, or it can shock/break the drive motor, read/write assembly, or circuit boards.

You were lucky. You'll stay luckier if you have three or more fully synchronized hard drives. (full sets of data, and don't waste time on full HD backups. No one really makes one that will swap into a computer and be up/running in minutes. Only redundant RAID can do that reliably)

You can duplicate a drive in your system with cloning software, but that's really just a software solution that acts a bit like RAID. I do it sometimes, and store the second drive or unhook it to get a system running again in short order. However, it's not ever truly up to date.
This has been a real bugaboo in data security for many years. There are a thousand pretenders to data security in the marketplace. Never seen one that is strong and secure. Usually some weakness. Why.... those systems are designed and written by Human Beings.

The closest you can come to secure data is:

1) Plan for, in fact, expect failure.
2) Reduntant... many levels of redundancy
3) Off site duplication storage
4) Forget the "cloud". Who do you call when the web site disappears over the weekend. One that purported to be for Pro Photographers did just that. There have been others. Have any of you examined the financial statements of web sites that say they can protect your images. Will they succeed in the internet market?
5) Who is ultimately responsible for your data. YOU... not even your wife or kids.

My personal take on LaCie is that they are just a marketing company using branded drives from various manufacturers. Their history is no better or worse than the drive that is inside. How they handle their drives may be another story.

I do know, from gutting a broken LaCie that they have used Seagate, and am told other hard drives. There are really a very small number of surviving actual manufactures of hard drive. Offhand, I can think of Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi. Possibly Fujitsu.

In fact if you google or yahoo LaCie hard drive reliabilty, you may not be so pleased. Your only solution is build true redundancy in your backups.

Would you have lost images in the recent debacle. If yes, perfect the system. Drive reliability won't truly protect you. Redundancy will. And forget the Cloud... they don't guarantee anything.

True reduncancy is two complete sources at home, and not in partitions on the same drive, or second drives in the computer. Then the final step is one more completely redundant system off site (outside the home--safe deposit, whatever)

Don't lose too much sleep simply because I would never buy a LaCie. Get the system in place and it won't matter. There are NO truly reliable drives on a long term basis. Current time before you are pushing a drive is 4-5 years. And that's only estimated life span on the bearings inside. Motors, circuit boards, and platters all have their own MTBF, which comes from the results of testing on mfr... it means "mean time between failures".

25 years consulting, teching and WMAO on PC's. (No MACs/Apples allowed. If someone comes to my door, driving up in a SAAB, wearing striped T or polo shirts, Plaid knee length shorts or 10 pocket cargo shorts [calf length], birkenstocks, and a pocket protector, I presume He/She has an Apple product and I don't answer the door. No money in it. When I did try to do MACs/Apples, I got no calls. I could seriously relate to the Maytag repair man. Now you know why they are so Freaking expensive up front.)

[L David Tomei]

I should also note that the failure of my drive was not in the internal drive itself, apparently. The LaCie that I have has a Western drive inside but LaCie uses other manufacturers as well.

[Richard G]

I don't get hoping that a particular drive is good. The point is, no single drive is ever any good, from the point of view of what you are using it for. I have had two LaCie drives die in the last 6 years. Currently I am running two LaCie firewire 800 1TB drives and a Apple time machine 1TB. That last is a replacement for one that died. Nothing lost. I assume one of the current storage drives will die today and another tomorrow. If you don't assume that, there is no point in backing up at all.

[Richard G]

If the drive power supply is the only thing that is gone you may be able to mount the old drive in a cheap caddy and access it.

[I Love Film]

There are numerous kinds of drive failures. Some are simple to recover, others virtually impossible.

If the formatting or software on a drive gets scrambled, it may be possible to recover it easily and cheaply, depending on the OS and other factors.

If there is physical drive failure, damage to the drive platters, component failure, then it can be very difficult and costly to recover, well over $1000. There is a very high probability that recovery will impossible.

You can't make generalizations.

If you are computer illiterate, when a drive falls off the table, stops working inside your computer, etc., unplug it, STOP TRYING TO USE IT, do not write to it, and get help from someone who knows what they are doing.

For your important work, you need multiple redundant backups. Backing up only to one drive is not good insurance.

[Rob-F]

Originally Posted by Richard G

If the drive power supply is the only thing that is gone you may be able to mount the old drive in a cheap caddy and access it.

I'd like to know more about that. Can this be done with any drive, or at least with any Western Digital? I assume "caddy" is the drive's enclosure? Or is it the mechanism that runs the disk?

MY WD uses an external power supply, which is good--it measures 12VDC at the plug. The green light in the drive's power switch that is supposed to come on when you click the switch, doesn't come on. Could even be a bad switch. Should I just take it apart and see if it's the switch? (I'm an FCC licensed radar tech, just don't know about puters. Old school, you know . . .)

[craygc]

Originally Posted by Rob-F

MY WD uses an external power supply, which is good--it measures 12VDC at the plug

Well you're only part way there ...a SATA drive has 3 power taps, one at 3.3V, a second at 5V and the third at 12V. The 3.3V is usually never used, the 5V is for the circuitry and the 12V is only for the platter and head motors.

EDIT: Ooops ...just realised you're actually referring to the power brick of the enclosure and not the plug to the physical drive.

[wpb]

Often recovery services don't remove the platters; they find an identical drive and swap out the hard drive controller. If your drive spins up but makes "ticking" noises this is often due to the controller malfunctioning. The controller (the circuit board attached to almost all HDDs) can also sometimes be brought back to life if chilled in the freezer. Crunching or grinding is really the worst noises from a HDD as the read/write head or platters are physically damaged- that requires real data recovery expertise.

[L David Tomei]

That's why I backup on Carbonite. ... and yes, I can only hope that my current drive lasts but I've had four failures in 3 years although all was recoverable so far. That being said, my film archives are still in the drawers with no failures expected for another couple decades.

[L David Tomei]

So, I suppose the answer to the original question is to have the failure diagnosed to determine where the failure occurred and whether it could be a simple job of pulling an otherwise functional internal drive to recover the data, or whether it was an unrecoverable file corruption. Another lesson is to have everything backed up somewhere else like Carbonite (not an endorsement).
Anyway, we all should worry that our digital images may not be there in 20 years.

[andersju]

Originally Posted by Tony Pio

Anyway, we all should worry that our digital images may not be there in 20 years.

Storage will continue to get cheaper and faster and physically smaller. Internet access will continue to get cheaper and faster.

As long as you always have a few backups (with one of them stored at a different location), you'll be fine.

I have data from more than 20 years ago. When I was a kid, the most important thing was the games folder on the family computer. It has survived from the late 80s to this day, through various computers/drives/operating systems. I can still even play the games, thanks to emulators. Police Quest 1, aaahhh.

Now I only keep it out of nostalgia, and as a collection of memories. (Filenames and their "last modified at..." dates can evoke all sorts of memories.) But my point is: your digital images will definitely be there in 20 years if you care about them enough and keep proper backups. I'd be much more worried about negatives.

[sevo]

Originally Posted by Rob-F

Has anyone had any experience with data recovery? Or getting hard drives fixed? Where does one go for this?

The biggest seem to be Kroll Ontrack.

If the hardware is significantly bad, recovery will not be cheap. The only time I (or rather, my then company) needed a service like that we spent close to $3500 and waited for weeks - it positively is no cheap fast substitute to sorting out the backups...

[Vince Lupo]

Originally Posted by sevo

The biggest seem to be Kroll Ontrack.

I used their services a couple of years ago to recover an external hard drive of mine that went belly up. It cost me $1600, but I got everything back.

[jordanstarr]

...easy solution...buy a film cameara, a bunch of sleeves, archival boxes, individual sleeves and cardboard sleeves. No crash, no recovery, just organize, store and take out when needed =)

...sorry, I couldn't resist. After losing so many digital photographs in 10 years (even with backing up and RE-backing up), I feel your pain, but have yet to lose a single negative in that same time. Had a bad scare a while back but found them in another binder. Sorry, I can't offer any advice -only unwanted sarcasm.

[rxmd]

Originally Posted by jordanstarr

...easy solution...buy a film cameara, a bunch of sleeves, archival boxes, individual sleeves and cardboard sleeves. No crash, no recovery, just organize, store and take out when needed =)

...sorry, I couldn't resist. After losing so many digital photographs in 10 years (even with backing up and RE-backing up), I feel your pain, but have yet to lose a single negative in that same time. Had a bad scare a while back but found them in another binder. Sorry, I can't offer any advice -only unwanted sarcasm.

The way you describe it makes it sound more like a problem with your backup strategy.

And of course the analog approach works only if you have more or less stable negatives (well-fixed B&W, no C41 from corner minilabs, etc. pp.) and if you don't mind scanning them over and over again if you have to reuse them and don't keep track of your digital files too.

[nksyoon]

Another option for peace of mind is to use a RAID system - I use a Western Digital My Studio II which has 2x 2TB disks in one case. Basically the system has the same data on both disks. If one fails the other will have the data, you just replace the disk with a new one of the same type and capacity and the system will recover the data.

This is for the first backup, the second backup is a single 3TB disk which is kept at my brother's house.

[rxmd]

Originally Posted by nksyoon

Another option for peace of mind is to use a RAID system - I use a Western Digital My Studio II which has 2x 2TB disks in one case. Basically the system has the same data on both disks. If one fails the other will have the data, you just replace the disk with a new one of the same type and capacity and the system will recover the data.

This is for the first backup, the second backup is a single 3TB disk which is kept at my brother's house.

RAID isn't really a backup solution, it's an availability solution. The point of a RAID-1 system such as the one you describe is that if one of your two drives physically breaks, you can continue working while you try to get a replacement as quickly as possible. That's pretty much the only thing it will defend you against, but far from the most common source of error.

Accidentally deleted a file? It's immediately deleted forever on both your hard drives. Overwritten a file with bogus data? The old one is gone. Bitrot makes a file go bad? It will likely happen only on one of your two drives, and you have no way of recovering which is which. People break into your house and steal stuff? Unless the RAID is in a safe, both drives are gone at the same time.

There is really no replacement for a backup strategy, and the spare drive at your brother's is, in a way, much more functional towards that

[Rob-F]

Originally Posted by photomoof

2) Files should NEVER be deleted from a backup.

Q: Why is that?

Also, I would like to know more about this: "Backup should not be confused with an archive one works with. Do not work from your backup, use it for recovery." It suggests there is a difference between backup and archive. New concept for me.