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Sod's Law & Hard Drive Failures...

A

ajthomason

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 20, 2007
359
0
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern I
I have (had) an iomega 1TB external drive made up of 2 x 500GB Seagate HDDs and bound together using RAID 0. I used to have it with RAID 1 for redundancy, but when I ran out of space, I decided that I would have to lose the redundancy and have it as one large drive, so I did this.

Ever since then it has been bugging me that they are not protected and their contents (200 odd Movies that I've ripped from DVDs) will be lost forever if something were to happen to the drives and so this morning I finally decided that I couldn't run the risk any longer and ordered a Drobo from Amazon with the aim of putting the two 500GB HDs (along with another 500GB and a 250GB I have lying around) in it, to give me just over 1TB of fully redundant storage.

To this end, I thought that I had better clear off the drives and spread their contents over all the small drives and internal drives I have on my network so they would be ready when the Drobo arrives tomorrow to go straight in it.

So, here I am, Monday morning, pressing the power button on the front of my iomega HD on what promises to be the last day of having a non redundant drive system. As soon as I pressed the power button, I knew that I was screwed - If ever you have had a hard drive fail on you, you will be able to recognise the clicking sound that they often make as the head fails to align to the disk and it was this sound that I was greeted with, followed closely by the red LED on the front of the case indicating that something was wrong...

You guessed it, one of the two drives has completely failed (I've tried everything that I can think of to get it to work again, if only for 20 mins while I copy the files), but nothing has worked - in fact, it is worse as there is no sound at all any more; even the clicking noise would be nice.

The even more irritating thing is that I've not only lost the contents of one 500GB HD, but I've lost both because they were in RAID 0 and to happen the day before my redundant array system arrives... it just has to be Sod's law!

The only solace that I can find is that all I lost were the moves that I can re-rip, but that will take a lot more time that you would imagine with the organising in iTunes, finding artwork etc...

If anyone knows a way to save the other drive, I'd appreciate it, but that's now why I'm posting, I just wanted to warn others not to make the same mistake that I did!
 
I don't have any advice to offer you for getting the data back. I don't think you can, since with RAID0, the data is split among all the drives in an array, so you only have half of your data on the good drive. But just an FYI, you can't just stick a drive with data already on it in a Drobo and expect it to be there. Whenever you insert a drive into a Drobo, it will format the drive and wipe everything out. It sounds like you were expecting to pop the drives in there with data already on them.

But, the Drobo is awesome. I've got one, and it's saved me from 2 drive failures (f**k you Seagate! :mad:) and it's really as simple and easy to use as they say it is.
 
I had a movie project stored on one 500gb drive once...the night I went to compile it into a .mpg to burn dvd's in the morning, the drive failed. Very new drive too, less than a year old...I was very, very upset. :)
 
yg17 said:
But just an FYI, you can't just stick a drive with data already on it in a Drobo and expect it to be there. Whenever you insert a drive into a Drobo, it will format the drive and wipe everything out. It sounds like you were expecting to pop the drives in there with data already on them.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I wasn't clear - What I was trying to do was move the contents of the 2 500GB drives to all the small drives I have lying around, leaving the 2 drives empty and putting those into the drobo and copying the files back from the small drives.

iomega refuse to replace just one of the drives, they want me to send in the whole enclosure with both drives - which kind of defeats the object if I were using RAID 1... Look! The data is OK, but you have to send it in to us where we will format it and send it back! :)
 
yg17 said:
But, the Drobo is awesome. I've got one, and it's saved me from 2 drive failures (f**k you Seagate! :mad:) and it's really as simple and easy to use as they say it is.
Click to expand...

It arrived this morning and is the most impressive piece of kit I've used in a while... It's faster (somehow managing +10MB/s, both using FW800), quieter and cooler than the iomega drive. Although I'm used to RAID systems and would be able to configure something semi-advanced, it just needs nothing - I've already tried pulling a couple of drives out to see what happens, and it just keeps on going... it just never stops copying files :D
 
It is a nice piece of hardware, I've had the v1 for nearly a year now and I love it.

How fast do your transfers get to? I have been considering replacing my USB one with the FW model.

As for saving the harddrives, short of paying someone to do it, I really don't think you have any options unfortunately.
 
No1451 said:
How fast do your transfers get to? I have been considering replacing my USB one with the FW model.

As for saving the harddrives, short of paying someone to do it, I really don't think you have any options unfortunately.
Click to expand...

I've given up anyway and thrown the working one into the drobo. I've had it up to about 36 - 40MB/s (reading from my MBPs internal drive), but 30MB/s seems a more consistent number:

879056444.png


I tried the USB on my MacBook (because it doesn't have FireWire :mad:) and it's noticeably slower, but not too bad.
 
Thats a bummer.

Drive failures is the biggest thing holding me back from a small network drive on the network, because anything that I put on there could be lost forever, and to raid1 with the same storage doubles to triples my cost. So in the mean time I guess I will just insert a DVD when I want to watch a movie.
 
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