I heard other accounts of these drives (250GB) failing but so far considered myself lucky (I have 4 of them and they've been running flawlessly). Well - it finally happenned to me too.
Worse - the failed drive was part of a mirrored (RAID-1) set so the corrupt files got replicated onto the good drive too. Good thing I had backups.
Keep in mind I'm a techo-dummy, but I thought the whole idea of a Raid 1 was to prevent this type of incident. (1) If that's not the purpose, what is? and (2) what would keep you from overwriting good backup files with corrupted ones? and (3) what is the best solution to fully protect your data? Sorry for the long wish of questions.
Bill, RAID-1 will protect you if a drive dies (as in goes off line). If the drive is still online and data on it is corrupt and it's the source drive then corrupt data will be automatically mirrored to the standby drive. It's certainly not a perfect solution but it does reduce the odds of failure significantly.
The best solution is to have a redundant setup (RAID 1, 0+1, and 5 are most common) combined with backup to external storage (optical or magnetic).
John - from what I've heard so far the WD drives are more reliable.
Note we're talking about consumer models. My high-end SCSI U320 Maxtor drive is blazing fast and will likely outlast me. Unfortunately they're not very cost effective and run very hot.
Ana - no symptoms at all. The RAID controller reported issues (something along the lines of "incomplete RAID set"), and files have become corrupt. Trying to rebuild the RAID array resulted in more errors and that was it.
I tried to mount each drive separately and realized one was bad - Windows still detected it but could not check or format it. The other drive was ok once formatted but the original data on it was not salvage-able.
I can report the same failure. My Maxtor 250Gb died last summer. Couldn't mount it no matter what steps I took. Maxtor replaced it with a 280Gb. I had everything backed up, but what a huge hassle. Now I don't turn it on unless I need it. It's a backup drive, so when I want to back up work I turn it on, back it up, drag the icon into the trash and shut it off. I've had no problems with this one. The 250Gb was left on for long periods of time, and it got plenty warm. I believe heat caused the failure. These days, if it's really warm in the room, I aim a small fan at the drive as well when I use it to dissipate heat faster.
I have naerly goten all of my digital and scanned images organized and I am looking for a ack up mechanism. I really am not looking forward to burning about 90 DVD's of raw images. I have been thinking about copying on to external drives on a networked PC. THe main setof images is on a RAID5 that I set up last December.
I had thought the Maxtor drives were some of the best, maybe when I go ahead and buy a few drives as a secondary backup I'll buy something else (I do have two Western Digitals - but they are only 100gb.)
I think I will back up on a regular basis and turn the drives off inbetween backups - does that sound like a good strategy?
I replaced my last Maxtor a month ago. I have lost four of them and replaced every one of the with Seagate drives. No problems so far from the Seagate drives. Seagate bought Maxtor last year so maybe the Maxtor drives will improve. Western Digital drives also gets good reviews from users I have talked to. Seagate also has a very good warranty - like five years. Maxtor is either one or three.
I've been thinking the same thing about the heat. Its been unusually hot here the last week or two and once I noticed my hard drive felt hot during the afternoon I started doing work with the hard drive in the morning and having it shut down the rest of the time. Normally I shut it down at night and turn it on in the morning.
Before I bought this drive, a maxtor, I researched quite a bit online and it seemed that maxtor, western and seagate had the best reviews but really I was suprised to read how many drives of every brand crashed. Isn't very encouraging. I'd like to get a system like raid I guess so I can quit burning copies onto CD/DVD to save myself time but just not sure how reliable that is yet. Randy
I have a Maxtor 300GB that is partially dead. After backing up files from my desktop, it will no longer establish comms with that PC. It works fine with my laptop (so far). Both computers are running the same operating system.
In trying to figure out the source of the problem, I've come across numerous message boards with a lot of negative things to say about the Maxtors. I don't know if that's typical or not, but I'll be reluctant to buy another Maxtor drive.
It's funny, I was just reading Tim Grey's Digital Darkroom newletter and someone had asked him about backup hard drives. He is currently recommendinig WD over Maxtor. He has used Maxtor's for years with few problems, but stated all hard drives will fail, it's just a matter of when, and multiple backups are the best prevention. When I was researching external hard drives, I found bad comments about them all. I eventually went with the Maxtor and have good luck so far. Keeping my fingers crossed and an extra backup to be safe!
Posted by Scott Buckel on July 6, 2006 at 12:06 PM
Rich - I had noticed the same thing. Tim used to recommend the one touch Maxtor drives and recently he has suggested that WD is a good drive. So I am in a big debate with myself about the external drive I need for a more secure backup. I have had drive fail from every vendor except WD.
I had a big crash last year (it was an old Seagate drive) and the DVD backups recovered everyting except 10 files and it required all three of the backup sets I had to accomplish my recovery. So currently I have backups on external drives and two different computers at the house. Now I need to figure out how to do some offsite backup, and I am thinking my office at work may be a good place (maybe it should be on Seagate drives since they can look at a Seagate facility outside my office window!).
Yes heat is one of the main reasons the hard drive fails. These new hard drives are spinning at 5400 to 10000 rpm and creating a lot of heat. You might want to take a look at a Hard Drive Dual Fan Cooler. You can buy them at a CompUSA type of store and they are only about $10 each. I've got 6 250 Gig drives in a RAID configruation and ran them without the fans for about a day or two. The drives were so hot you couldn't touch them without burning your hand. Put the hard drive coolers on and now they feel about like room temp.
I've mentioned it before, but my little buffalo terrastation is working well for me for backups. It has 4 drives mounted and the power supply draws a descent air current over everything in the box. I've set mine up as 2x250GB RAID 1 arrays. The four drives happen to be maxtor 250GB models, but they are ATA100 internal drives, not the external units. As an NAS unit, it offers some flexibility that you cannot get from an USB unit, but its less portable.
And heat is the main cause of failure for computer components. You need to keep things running cool.
Just as I read my email this evening, I read Tim Grey's DDQ. I thought it really kind of fit the direction of this thread. Here's the entire question and answer from Tim Grey:
My practice for backing up my digital photos is as follows: (1) daily backup of all files on my PC hard drive with a Maxtor One Touch external hard drive, (2) copy all optimized photos in folders to a second external hard drive (a Maxtor One Touch II), and (3) back up all those photos on archival CDs/DVDs to be stored in a separate location. I then periodically delete photos from my PC hard drive as it fills up since I have a double backup. I just had a total failure of my Maxtor One Touch II... thank goodness I had everything on CD/DVD backups. I am now a bit nervous about my Maxtor hard drives. At this point in time, all current technology considered, do you have any recommendations for an external hard drive system? Maybe Maxtor is still a good way to go and I just had really bad luck, but any advice would be appreciated before I purchase another hard drive.
==========
I would never recommend relying upon a single storage solution, of course, which is to say that you always need to be sure you have a reliable backup (more than one even) in place to protect your important images. Whenever I do talk about storage solutions, I get at least a few e-mails from people who have had failures of that type of media. The fact of the matter is, all storage media (whether film or digital) does experience failure at one time or another. Put simply, any storage media currently available will eventually fail. It is a matter of when, not if. All the more reason to backup regularly.
So, with the backdrop that you should consider any storage solution to be unreliable, the question is what you should use. Reliability is certainly an important consideration here. For hard drives, even the low-end mean time between failure (MTBF) represents about ten years. For the very best drives it is theoretically around 100 years. My feeling is that we're not likely to use a hard drive for that long. One of the advantages of hard drive storage is that it is relatively high-capacity and high-speed, so it is possible to keep your entire digital image library available pretty much always. As a result, the tendency is to migrate files to ever-larger hard drives rather than to just put an older hard drive on the shelf and let it sit (which I would strongly recommend against in any event). This is a good thing, because it tends to mean that we're replacing our hard drives before they are statistically likely to have a failure.
Of course, while an "average" hard drive might last ten years before failing, there will also be plenty of hard drives that last a very short time. I've had external hard drives fail within hours of taking them out of the original box. I've also had hard drives last longer than they were really useful. Your results may vary. All things considered, I think hard drives are pretty reliable. I trust them more than optical media (though there are plenty who disagree with me on this count), and think overall they represent the best storage solution because they offer high-capacity, high-speed, and convenience. So, I'd certainly stick with hard drives for storage, but I'd never miss a backup with any storage solution.
As to your question about Maxtor versus other brands, that's a bit more tricky. There are brands I consider to be bad that I avoid. There are drives I've generally had good luck with. I've used many Maxtor drives, and while I've had one fail I've had several serve me reliably for years. I've also been very happy with Western Digital drives, and use them regularly (I've tended toward Western Digital a bit more recently). I've had mixed results with LaCie, but they seem to be doing a good job more recently. You'll never escape the threat of a failed hard drive, so I would suggest going with a brand you feel comfortable with and still making sure to backup regularly.
Your peace of mind is important, so in your case I'd probably favor Western Digital over Maxtor, just so you don't feel as nervous. But whatever you do, don't stop your already-excellent backup process!
What I do is double back up my desktop harddrive every night identically to two external drives -- Maxtors. I figure if one of them fails, the back up software (SmartSync Pro) will tell me, and I can immediately replace that drive. It seems unlikely that my main drive and both external hard drives will fail all at once. For that reason, I don't back up to DVDs or CDs at all. This seemed like a pretty safe system to me when I set it up, but I see others have more elaborate systems. What's wrong with mine?
Tom, there's nothing wrong with your system, but there is the risk that files on your work drive will become corrupt and you will copy the corrupt files to your backup drives, replacing the good versions. If this happens to files you don't use very often it may be a while before you know anything is wrong.
Discussion
20 repliesI heard other accounts of these drives (250GB) failing but so far considered myself lucky (I have 4 of them and they've been running flawlessly). Well - it finally happenned to me too.
Worse - the failed drive was part of a mirrored (RAID-1) set so the corrupt files got replicated onto the good drive too. Good thing I had backups.
Guy
The best solution is to have a redundant setup (RAID 1, 0+1, and 5 are most common) combined with backup to external storage (optical or magnetic).
Guy
Note we're talking about consumer models. My high-end SCSI U320 Maxtor drive is blazing fast and will likely outlast me. Unfortunately they're not very cost effective and run very hot.
Guy
I tried to mount each drive separately and realized one was bad - Windows still detected it but could not check or format it. The other drive was ok once formatted but the original data on it was not salvage-able.
Guy
I had thought the Maxtor drives were some of the best, maybe when I go ahead and buy a few drives as a secondary backup I'll buy something else (I do have two Western Digitals - but they are only 100gb.)
I think I will back up on a regular basis and turn the drives off inbetween backups - does that sound like a good strategy?
So who has the best?
Before I bought this drive, a maxtor, I researched quite a bit online and it seemed that maxtor, western and seagate had the best reviews but really I was suprised to read how many drives of every brand crashed. Isn't very encouraging. I'd like to get a system like raid I guess so I can quit burning copies onto CD/DVD to save myself time but just not sure how reliable that is yet. Randy
In trying to figure out the source of the problem, I've come across numerous message boards with a lot of negative things to say about the Maxtors. I don't know if that's typical or not, but I'll be reluctant to buy another Maxtor drive.
I had a big crash last year (it was an old Seagate drive) and the DVD backups recovered everyting except 10 files and it required all three of the backup sets I had to accomplish my recovery. So currently I have backups on external drives and two different computers at the house. Now I need to figure out how to do some offsite backup, and I am thinking my office at work may be a good place (maybe it should be on Seagate drives since they can look at a Seagate facility outside my office window!).
Scott
Brian
And heat is the main cause of failure for computer components. You need to keep things running cool.
Just as I read my email this evening, I read Tim Grey's DDQ. I thought it really kind of fit the direction of this thread. Here's the entire question and answer from Tim Grey:
My practice for backing up my digital photos is as follows: (1) daily backup of all files on my PC hard drive with a Maxtor One Touch external hard drive, (2) copy all optimized photos in folders to a second external hard drive (a Maxtor One Touch II), and (3) back up all those photos on archival CDs/DVDs to be stored in a separate location. I then periodically delete photos from my PC hard drive as it fills up since I have a double backup. I just had a total failure of my Maxtor One Touch II... thank goodness I had everything on CD/DVD backups. I am now a bit nervous about my Maxtor hard drives. At this point in time, all current technology considered, do you have any recommendations for an external hard drive system? Maybe Maxtor is still a good way to go and I just had really bad luck, but any advice would be appreciated before I purchase another hard drive.
==========
I would never recommend relying upon a single storage solution, of course, which is to say that you always need to be sure you have a reliable backup (more than one even) in place to protect your important images. Whenever I do talk about storage solutions, I get at least a few e-mails from people who have had failures of that type of media. The fact of the matter is, all storage media (whether film or digital) does experience failure at one time or another. Put simply, any storage media currently available will eventually fail. It is a matter of when, not if. All the more reason to backup regularly.
So, with the backdrop that you should consider any storage solution to be unreliable, the question is what you should use. Reliability is certainly an important consideration here. For hard drives, even the low-end mean time between failure (MTBF) represents about ten years. For the very best drives it is theoretically around 100 years. My feeling is that we're not likely to use a hard drive for that long. One of the advantages of hard drive storage is that it is relatively high-capacity and high-speed, so it is possible to keep your entire digital image library available pretty much always. As a result, the tendency is to migrate files to ever-larger hard drives rather than to just put an older hard drive on the shelf and let it sit (which I would strongly recommend against in any event). This is a good thing, because it tends to mean that we're replacing our hard drives before they are statistically likely to have a failure.
Of course, while an "average" hard drive might last ten years before failing, there will also be plenty of hard drives that last a very short time. I've had external hard drives fail within hours of taking them out of the original box. I've also had hard drives last longer than they were really useful. Your results may vary. All things considered, I think hard drives are pretty reliable. I trust them more than optical media (though there are plenty who disagree with me on this count), and think overall they represent the best storage solution because they offer high-capacity, high-speed, and convenience. So, I'd certainly stick with hard drives for storage, but I'd never miss a backup with any storage solution.
As to your question about Maxtor versus other brands, that's a bit more tricky. There are brands I consider to be bad that I avoid. There are drives I've generally had good luck with. I've used many Maxtor drives, and while I've had one fail I've had several serve me reliably for years. I've also been very happy with Western Digital drives, and use them regularly (I've tended toward Western Digital a bit more recently). I've had mixed results with LaCie, but they seem to be doing a good job more recently. You'll never escape the threat of a failed hard drive, so I would suggest going with a brand you feel comfortable with and still making sure to backup regularly.
Your peace of mind is important, so in your case I'd probably favor Western Digital over Maxtor, just so you don't feel as nervous. But whatever you do, don't stop your already-excellent backup process!
Guy