[s-cars] NAC: hard drive crash

[Matt twentyV]

> If you're worried about hard drive quality going
> down, I would recommend not
> using "consumer" grade hard drives at all.
> 
Having worked in the HDD industry for 20 years,
initially as a design engineer and more lately as a
systems integrator, I've followed this thread with
interest.

The only comment I can add to the recovery suggestions
is that I would be a little careful about the freezer
technique suggested in one post.  While it indeed may
help if the problem is the head has stuck to the disk
(I can get into the physics if anyone is interested),
there is a risk.  Once it is removed to room
temperature condensation will form- not good.  A big
drive killer for laptops is when a laptop is carried
in a car at sub-freezing temperatures and then brought
inside.  The condensation can be mitigated if the PC
is immediately powered up; the self-generated heat and
air circulation will prevent it from forming.

As for the above comment about "enterprise" drives,
well, yes and no.  Me, I'm not afraid to use Consumer
drives both personally and professionaly.  Read this
paper: 
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html#Seagate
without divulging confidential information all I can
say is that it is a good summary.  It looked at a very
large population of drives of different varieties, and
you can see that the failure rates are all over the
place with no real trends as to type of drive, ranging
from merely bad to downright horrible.  Any drive can
fail- due to the complex electro-mechanical structure
the failure rate is much higher than any other
computer part.  Some models are more prone to failure
(that IBM drive did get a bad reputation but in
general their drives (now Hitachi) are no better or
worse than others (full disclosure- I worked at the
IBM drive division for 10 years but not on that
drive)), every manufacturer has landed a turd
somewhere along the line.  

Yes the best advice here is to adopt a backup
strategy.  I use an external USB drive at home, but if
buying today I would go with a NAS device or just
network a cheap second PC.  At work my PC is
automatically backed up to a network server.  Everyone
gets religion after experiencing a crash.  Perhaps
Paul's failure will lead a few of us to start before
it is too late!

-Matt



 
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