Tag Archives: Beware

What’s The Best / Most Reliable Hard Drive?

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We get asked this question a lot. The simple answer is that there is no such thing as a reliable hard drive. This is nothing against the hard drive manufacturers, but all drives will fail eventually. Hard drives are delicate machines and must be treated with care. They are not designed to be the one and only storage for all your work, photos and videos. Imagine your computer never booting up again, and then imagine it happening during the most important job you have ever done. That’s how bad it could be, and often is for a lot of people.

A good lifespan for a hard drive is now probably around 3-5 years. In reality we often see hard drives that are only a few months old. If you’re a gambler then maybe you have got away with it so far, but is it really worth the risk?

Backup your data. Maybe then you won’t need to find out how good we are at recovering it.

Read more about backing up your data here

Thai Floods Also Hitting Seagate

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Last week we wrote about the Thai floods affecting hard drive manufacturer Western Digital. It now appears that the floods are causing problems for Seagate. Although not directly affecting their own manufacturing plants, the floods are causing problems in the supply chain, which could cause delays and shortages getting their drives to market.

Read more at the Register

 

Badly Damaged Heads

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Inside a broken hard drive today we came across some of the most damaged read / write heads we have ever seen. Below is an example of how the heads should look. Notice how straight they are at the ends.

Good Seagate Heads

Good Seagate Heads

Then below are the damaged heads. They are at 90 degrees to the discs (tomb stoning) and would have been scraping the inner disc surfaces to pieces. Bad times!

Bad Seagate Heads

Bad Seagate Heads

Data Destruction Discussion On Slashdot

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Slashdot had an interesting article today about how to destroy hard drives. It’s a commonly asked question, but deserves a bit of time every once in a while. Of course there are the usual physical destruction options, from the humble hammer and screwdriver, to more exotic (and dangerous) techniques like a propane furnace.

For most purposes we still advise that a simple zeroing of the whole disk is a pretty safe bet. *

Failing that, then as long as you totally destroy the platters, you are good to go. That means taking the disk apart and grinding, bending and scraping the disks to bits.

* During normal use, a hard drive will get occasional bad sectors, which are then mapped out and prevented from being used. When that same sector is requested again, a new spare sector is used from another part of the disk. With the right knowledge, it is possible to access this list of remapped / bad sectors and see if there is any useful data within them. The chances of finding anything useful in these sectors is slim, but you never know.

Read the article on Slashdot

4K Sectors & RAID

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ZDNet has an interesting article about 4K sectors (Advanced Format), however what was more interesting was the bit about large SATA drives.

 Today’s large SATA drives shouldn’t be used in 4 drive RAID 5 arrays due to the high likelihood of a read error after a drive failure, which will abort the RAID rebuild.

It is a common misconception that if you run a RAID system then you can avoid keeping backups. Although fault tolerant to a point, there are plenty of issues with RAIDs that can at best cause lengthy downtime and at worst prevent any recovery at all.

More info on RAID Recovery

Apple iMac 1TB Seagate Hard Drive Replacement Program

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We at Dataquest have been aware of the problem with 1TB Seagate drives for some time. It is pleasing to see that Apple are also recognising the problem and are offering their customers a free swap out. These drives are mainly seen in iMacs, but you may also get them in the Mac Pro so make sure your back ups are up to date.

Apple Time Machine & iPhoto

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There appears to be a quirk with Time Machine on Macs, where iPhoto library is not being backed up. So I recommend that customers check their backups to make sure that Time Machine has backed up correctly. If they find that the backup does not contain the iPhoto library, then in future you need to make sure the iPhoto application is closed before Time Machine starts.

SSDs Not Secure

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Some tests carried out by the “Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory” have revealed some serious flaws with SSDs ability to be securely erased. When using standard tools designed for spinning disks, the results were understandably bad. They also tried the built-in “Security Erase Unit” command and the results of this were generally not good. After being securely erased, most of the SSDs still contained some large fragments of the test files.

Some secure erasure software would be similarly inefficient for hard disks anyway, as things like remapped or bad sectors can still contain readable data which may not be erased during the process.

The simplest solution for securely erasing any data is to completely destroy the storage media. For hard drives this means making a real mess of the platters, for SSDs it means wrecking the whole PCB, data chips and controller chips.

Read More On Slashdot