Moving Walkway

Over the past two weeks I’ve had two hard drive failures. I have mixed backup setups currently…some things are backed up often, some things are backed up once in a blue moon, and others never. Some things I’ve learned over this experience.

• I had preferred Seagate drives because they had 5 year warrantees. I figure if they had the confidence to offer it, the drives would (statistically) last longer. I don’t believe this anymore, 2 Seagate drives have failed, 2 Maxtor drives and 1 Fujitsu drive. Of all these, only the Fujitsu drive was under a warrantee (and it was something like 4.5 years old).
• Seagate OEM drives are not covered by a 5 year manufacturer warrantee. You have to goto the OEM. Apple in the case of my 18 month old Mac Mini, but I didn’t have AppleCare. The other case it was a bare drive (now 3 years old) I bought which was an OEM drive (not sure I realized it, but maybe I did based on price).
• You need multiple backups “just in case.” Backups copied to other machines, copied to external hard drives, copied to network file servers, internet based backup solutions. We’ll see how Time Machine does on the Mac.
• Disk Warrior worked well for me. It saved my bacon. I had all of my Music, but my pictures had not been backed up (off site DVD) for about 18 months. By booting the Disk Warrior CD, it was able to save most everything. I had to copy it to an external drive, but that was painless…just plug a Mac formatted USB drive in and say “copy all” to that volume.
• SeaTools (Seagate’s diagnostic tool) isn’t very good. I’m not entirely sure, but Seatools seams weak. I took the “failed” drive that had read errors and tested it with Seatools. It failed with read errors, not a diagnostic code. I tried a zero write on the whole drive. I think this said it worked. This is supposed to make the drive attempt a write and read, and if something has problems, deal with it. The drive still failed. I almost threw the drive in the trash.
• PowerMax (Maxtor’s old diagnostic tool before Seagate bought Maxtor) seams to work pretty well. I only have version 1.14 (or something like that) and can’t download 1.46 (the latest) because Seagate thinks SeaTools is the answer. PowerMax was able to “format” the drive and it now passes all of the tests in both PowerMax AND Seatools. Time will tell if it is really fine, or if the problem has just gone underground and is waiting to rise from the dead.

In the end I haven’t lost anything on either computer, but it was close. I need to put a complete backup strategy in place, but I struggle with the right way given the number of computers, the amount of data and my desire to make it very low cost. Perhaps I’m being penny wise and pound foolish. The smartest thing was to spend $100 on Disk Warrior early in the process.

[tags]harddrive, failure, backup, apple, seagate, seatools, powermax[tags]