If you have important data on your computer Hard Drives back it up... and back it up soon! If its a small amount of data buy a 1 to 8gig "flash" or "thumb" drive that plugs into a USB port to back stuff up onto. If you have more data buy a 2nd HD and back it up!

My wife just had a catasrophic HD failure and lost all her data (I have a means for her to back up her data, she just never did). Life journal, cookbook shes been working on, tons of other info she needed... our taxes back to 1998... ugh.

I bought her a new HD, 320 gig for $69, which is insanely cheap concidering the amount of storage per dollar you can buy now. The fried drive (drive controller chip on the circuit board exploded due to a power spike) is now at a data recovery service to see if they can pull the data off... they gave me an initial estimate of $1k with a 85-100% recovery rate but they havent been able to get it to work yet.

Anyway its cheaper to back up important data now! New big storage drive is under $70, a thumb drive could be as little as $10... back your stuff up... do it soon! You never know when murphy will strike.


-DallanC

Thats ashame Dallan. I hope they can recover your data. It's amazing the info we have on our computers that we asume will be there whenever we need it. Backing the files up is good advice.
Joe

are you sure its gone dallan? i do recon on drives and sometimes you can get things back from even the worst possable occurances.. i had a computer that was flooded in a repair shop, so add all the chemicals, oils, etc along with the mud and goo of the normal flooding, well this pc floated out the office and was under 8 inches of mud, i got 98% of the data back for the guy.. took a little over a week to do it but it can be done..

Yeah, I need to do something like that..
The trouble is, I got over 2 terra byte to backup..

Geland,

Set up a RAID array and get some of the big 500GB hard drives.

Heck with that much data a dedicated "server" to store/access all of this might be handy.

Dimitri

gelandangan wrote:

Yeah, I need to do something like that.. The trouble is, I got over 2 terra byte to backup..

shows what I know....

Dimitri wrote:

Set up a RAID array and get some of the big 500GB hard drives.

Raid is used to kill bugs here....

1 TB = 1 Tara byte = 1,024 gigabytes (GB).

RAID = "Redundant Array of Independent Disks"

You connect multipul drives together, to ether strip data and make 2 drives one big one, or to make 2 copies of all the data on 2 drives, just incase one fails, and some set ups do a combination of both with alot of drives.

Dimitri

Morax wrote:

are you sure its gone dallan? i do recon on drives and sometimes you can get things back from even the worst possable occurances.. i had a computer that was flooded in a repair shop, so add all the chemicals, oils, etc along with the mud and goo of the normal flooding, well this pc floated out the office and was under 8 inches of mud, i got 98% of the data back for the guy.. took a little over a week to do it but it can be done..

The platters should be fine, its the pcb thats totally fried.. they have to rebuild a new PCB to match the original before extraction can take place. Their engineer has been working on it for 4 days now, no success as of yet but they seem to think they will get it back. This is a very big company that does this full time so they have some incredible tools at their disposal.

Dimitri wrote:

Geland, Set up a RAID array and get some of the big 500GB hard drives. Heck with that much data a dedicated "server" to store/access all of this might be handy. Dimitri

Striped Raid Arrays... that just multiplies the chance you will have a drive failure LOL. 2 drives striped = 2x the chance of loosing your data... 4 striped = 4x the chance something will fail

Actually the proper way to do raid is 8 drives, 7 for regular data and a parity drive to handle a case where any of the other drives fail, data can be reconstituted. Thats well beyond the needs of most people though.


-DallanC

Dallan,

Well they got a ton of levels, I was just thinking of a RAID 1+0 array 4x 500GB drives for the data, and another 4x 500GB drives for "back up".

Then again a SSD (Solid State Drive) would probably be the best way to keep your important data safe.

Dimitri

Dallan, I feel for your wife mate. I had similar happen about 12 months ago. I only lost about 130gb of data, but like your wife, it was data that I could ill afford to loose.

Unfortunately I simply can't afford, nor justify, the cost of a data recovery company. I got quotes between $500 and $5000 depending on what they have to do.

I went outr and purchased a Western Digital "My Little Black Book" with 320gb of storage, which is double what I have on the computer. Fingers crossed, the data I now have stored on it will never be needed.

Cheers, Vince

Vince,

I got the same My book, and as long as you dont access it all the time it should last a very long time compared to your computers HDD that gets used alot.

The desktop I built back in 2003 HDD is still going strong a "early model" Seagate 160GB SATA drive (onboard connection not PCI card). I was the first person I knew with one of them fancy SATA drives.

Dimitri

..[/quote]

The platters should be fine, its the pcb thats totally fried.. they have to rebuild a new PCB to match the original before extraction can take place. Their engineer has been working on it for 4 days now, no success as of yet but they seem to think they will get it back. This is a very big company that does this full time so they have some incredible tools at their disposal.[/quote]


ok so this tells me this was on a inhouse made drive, or of course they would already have a drive setup to be able to drop the platters into for this kind of work. i am using general statements here with a broad range type of comentation, of course we all know ya dont just drop them in but ya all understand what i am saying.. why use big long winded words when one will do?

Morax,

There are alot of variations, even between the same "models" of computer components, I doubt eve the manufacturer keeps spares of every one they ever made.

Dimitri

Dimitri wrote:

Morax, There are alot of variations, even between the same "models" of computer components, I doubt eve the manufacturer keeps spares of every one they ever made. Dimitri

Its actually worse than that... every single drive, has a unique "thumbprint" of bad regions on the platters, where to position the heads to read etc etc... ALOT of variables. Those variables are unique to each drive and are stored in a bios chip on the pcb for that drive only. So basically even if you have 2 identical HDs, purchased at the same time, there will be differences that can prevent a pcb swap from working.

I did alot of research into this at first as I figured "hey I'll just buy a used similar HD off ebay and do a board swap...", but as I googled up more and more info, the more I found out this wouldnt work. So off to the professionals it went (they at least do free estimates... and 0 payment if nothing is recovered).

In all truth, the drive is actually at the SECOND data recovery place... I sent it off to another one originally and they had a go at it and determined it was beyond their technology so they recommended another company located in the same city. They even got me 10% off the 2nd companys fees for being referred. Best part was no shipping, they work all that out between themselves.

So anyway I hope #2 comes through... if not its free.


-DallanC