fedward, tumbling

The Best Backup Drive is Two Backup Drives

In the past year (or so) I have had four hard drives fail on me.  Three of them have failed since about Thanksgiving, and the trendsetter actually kicked off this horrible slide something like a year and a half ago, but four drives in two years doesn’t sound as awful as it felt.  Four drives in a year sounds much more awful, although still not actually as awful as it felt.  But anyway:

• The first was a Western Digital MyBook, 500GB.  Its failure was one of error correction and firmware.  Western Digital, of course, denies that anything could possibly be wrong with its drive firmware, but there you are.  What happened in my case (and seems to happen a lot) is that the drive failed to seek a particular bit of data in the time it allots, and so it recorded an error.  This happened a lot, as the drive was in use as DVR storage, and eventually the error count got so high that the drive decided it wasn’t going to work anymore.  Age at death: 2 years.  For what it’s worth, I voided the warranty* and got most of my data off, installing the replacement drive (a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda) in its housing.

* You can buy an internal hard drive with a warranty.  If you buy an external hard drive, even though the drive contained inside is the same thing you could also have bought at retail (with a retail part number on the label and everything), opening up just the housing (which is plastic bits that snap together) is considered to be beyond the skills an end user might have. Yes, this is a stupid distinction for the company to make.  No, this is not the first time I’ve argued with a company about their warranty being inadequate.  I bat about .500 when I do that.

• The second drive to fail was the oldest of them all, a Seagate Momentus 4200.2 which was the OEM drive in my 1.42Ghz Mac mini.  Age at death: 4.5 years.  It seems to have died of old age as much as anything else.
• The third item in this sad parade was that 1.5TB Seagate, you know, the one I bought to replace the 500GB MyBook.  It died of a firmware bug that Seagate denies exists (it is JUST LIKE a firmware bug they eventually acknowledged in a different manufacturing run of the same drive, but they’d rather give me the finger than admit another firmware series has the same problem).  Seagate also refuses to pay for data recovery (which they did for drives affected by the bug they did acknowledge), since in doing that they’d be admitting the existence of that firmware bug.  Seagate can go to hell.  Age at death: 1 year.
• The final straw: two days ago the 320GB WD in my MacBook Pro failed to boot.  Its power management won’t start up.  Now, the MBP itself had a fall a week ago, but the drive worked for several days after that so it’s hard to say if the failure was caused directly, indirectly, or not at all by the fall.  Anyway, the drive is dead.  The MBP was long in the tooth anyway, with the screen bezel broken through on one side, keycaps falling off, and the LCD backlight starting to flicker with some regularity, but still, this was my main computer and losing its startup drive hurt most of all.  Drive age at death: 2 or 3 years.  I can’t remember exactly when I bought it.

When people ask me what kind of external drive to buy for backups, I tell them it doesn’t matter, just to buy two of them.  The past year I’ve had provides all the empirical data I need in order to make that recommendation.