External Hard drive Gone....

[Bob Romano]

A while back I lost an external Western Digital MY BOOK HD due to a surge after a lightning strike. I also had to replace my motherboard etc.

Yesterday, out of the blue, my Western Digital MY BOOK 500GB drive started acting weird. I tried to do several tests and even tried to copy my files to another drive but kept getting a CRC error (Cyclic Redundancy Check). The drive could not be read. I lost ALL of the DTS discs that I had "found" on line. Luckily I had many of them on cd.

I would stay away from WD My Books. I have the 1TB My Book that has been working (so far) but who knows for how long. I think I am going to switch to an enclosure with internal hardrives.

 

[diatonis]

Hi Bob,

I have problems with seagate 3.5 inch SATA and IDE drives of late. I used FinalData Standard 2.0: http://www.finaldata.com/sub_products/products_1.asp?pc1_code=winc
to recover the files. It can be booted from the CD if it's your system drive.

I think my problem has to do with USB but am uncertain as to why they become unreadable. I've since stopped using USB and am using an old 850MHz PC and two Promise ATA cards.

 

[winopener]

Always better to store the same thing on two hard drive.... one for "work", one for safety. If it's important, it's worth every penny.

 

[timbre4]

Wow Bob...

I have two My Books; a 250 for WORK work and a 500 for analog camcorder footage; so far no issues. My luck with WD has been really good compared to Maxtor for example.

I keep an external HD shell around to put drives in for transitions, rescue data, etc. Consider putting the bad drive into one of these and get Active File Recovery 7.1 to work on it. Had a Maxtor 120GB go south FULL of my personal band DATs, reels, and cassettes that I sure didn't want to process again. I managed to recover more than 95%...I've since burned most of it to DVD-Rs as well; power of redundancy!

 

[spenceo]

I've been using HP's 300gig Personal Media Drive for a while now with no issues. I think I paid $150.00 for it from HP, but I seen not long ago, Best Buy had them for $99.00. I like the fact it slides into my desktop's chassis and completely hides. I also use it to backup my business computer. I find it travels well between to two computers. And Bob, I also "found" a few of those DTS files myself, PM me if you lost something you can't find again. I may be able to help.

Spence

 

[Bob Romano]

Thanks for the suggestions.....

 

[Old Quad Guy]

Sorry about the drive crash, perhaps it can be fixed. I back-up everything onto disc CD's and DVD-ROM's 2 times. The downside is I'm swamped with discs that need to go in boxes, but they still work, even the one's over 10 years old.

 

[timbre4]

I meant to add that after browsing the $70 & up solutions, the Active File Recovery 7.1 was a bargain at $29. Couldn't spend a hundred on this and free only gave me floppy drive manueverability...

 

[JonUrban]

I keep my "MyBooks" powered off and disconnected from power unless I need them. I have 2 500's and a 1TB. So far, so good, but you never know.

Do most people leave them on and connected all of the time?

 

[Bob Romano]

I did.... until it fried. I do have the 1TB still hooked up but that is by Firewire not USB. Not sure it matters though. The 1TB seems to power off with the computer.

 

[Old Quad Guy]

I don’t trust external hard drives (or Discs) to keep their storage Mac or Windows. I plug in external drives with the computer power off and after booting up save what I need onto them, then shut the computer off and disconnect the drive. Then I pray that they will still work when needed. Perhaps 2 seperate drives are needed to back up everything along with a DVD-ROM disc.

 

[timbre4]

My pair have been left running for the most part, connected to a USB 2.0 hub / iPod dock. After this discussion, I will probably shut them off until I need them! I think they contribute to slowing down some file activities anyway.

 

[Mars74]

What about Ethernet Network drives ?

 

[neil wilkes]

HDD die.
This is a fact of life.
Also, external HDD must be spun up regularly, or else the spindles can freeze. Ask Steely Dan's engineer.
He recorded an entire tour to external HDD, put them away & 6 months later, 90% would no longer spin up.
Gone forever.....

 

[timbre4]

Ah, the Roger Nichols lament....

That's the problem; if I take them off line, I will forget to spin them up periodically.

I nearly lost one drive or so I thought; the PC could not recognize it. So I hastily plugged it into the USB 2.0 port on my main PC and it was recognized as having issues that ScanDisk fixed right off the bat.

That other PC has since had a secondary HD crash (described earlier and 95% recovered) and now a fresh primary drive & XP Home install and is working great.

 

[Quadwreck]

HDD die.
This is a fact of life.
Also, external HDD must be spun up regularly, or else the spindles can freeze. Ask Steely Dan's engineer.
He recorded an entire tour to external HDD, put them away & 6 months later, 90% would no longer spin up.
Gone forever.....

That sounds like a mechanical problem that should be repairable (I've never opened up a hard-drive, so I'm only musing on on the way other things work). Is it?

 

[Dylan Berichon]

Do not ever use Western Digital hard disks for anything.

Hitachi hard disks are about as close to perfect as they come. They last forever.

I just had a 3 month old Seagate hard disk die on me. Thankfully there was no important data on it, but this experience has soured me on their brand as well.

I've only ever had headaches with western digital though. I will never again buy one of their hard disks.

 

[timbre4]

And my experience is the opposite. So it goes.

 

[Old Quad Guy]

What is the ultimate solution for back up? What do we do... This is a Very important issue for us musicians and content creators.

My friend bought a Maxtor 4Plus 250 Gig Hardrive for Mac a couple of days ago to back up a $7000+ music progect, but I'm backing the drive up on DVD-ROM discs for added protection - if there is such a thing...

 

[Lucanu]

I used to backup my hardrives with tapes. My system is to hook a D8 or miniDV camcorder via Firewire and with a software called Firestreamer that change your camcorder into a tape backup system. You can backup about 20-30 Gb per tape.
Only drawback: it's not that fast.