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Be really careful with optical media for long-term storage. In a place I used to work, we would have old archives, first on CD, then DVD and eventually Bluray. I experienced problems which ranged from discs being rendered totally unreadable, to certain sectors being unreadable (which is no good for archive files unless there is redundancy built-into the file). And we're talking disks that ranged from 10 to only a few years old.
It was a standard office-type set up, but after hours, the air conditioning would shut off. I'm not sure whether that contributed significantly to the humidity and therefore accelerated the damage to the discs or not?
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The moral of the story is test and rotate your backups often.
Looks like HDDs are greener than SSDs:
The Dirty Carbon Secret Behind Solid State Memory Drives (https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-dirty-carbon-secret-behind-solid-state-memory-drives)
Clicking sound from a HDD is so called “Click of death” because that means the Hard drive is now broken and must berepaired orreplaced.
HDD and SSD can and do fail suddenly. I have had a 1TB external drive fail on me like this, it showed no prior signs of damage before it suddenly developed click of death.
Lemme fix that for you:Clicking sound from a HDD is so called “Click of death” because that means the Hard drive is now broken and must berepaired orreplaced.For all intents and purposes, hard disks cannot be repaired.
For the sake of data integrity and avoiding failures, I replace them long before they start clicking, by using SMART to identify issues. Not all failures can be predicted, but some SMART parameters (or rapid changes in them) are strong predictors of imminent failure.
For all intents and purposes, hard disks cannot be repaired.
Lemme fix that for you:Clicking sound from a HDD is so called “Click of death” because that means the Hard drive is now broken and must berepaired orreplaced.For all intents and purposes, hard disks cannot be repaired.it depends, sometime it can...
power glitch can cause some SMART parm to be marked.
and disk clone will clone the SMART parm as well,
so a marked SMART value as bad, can be all perfect green again.
For all intents and purposes, hard disks cannot be repaired.Repair as in you continue using it as a normal hdd no, but to get the data back you can some times.
If the error is in the drive controller board you can buy a donor hdd and replace one rom from the original to the donor board and swap them.
Example
Sometimes it is as simple as blown resistors/fuse/diode ofcourse you have to ask what caused this but hey if it works for a couple of hours that is enough to get the data off it.
Example
If it is a mechanical issue inside the drive then you better hire a pro company esp with current helium filled disks.
So best advice: back everything up !
I said “for all intents and purposes”, not “under all circumstances without exception”. Data recovery (as a result of a failure to back up properly) is the ONLY situation where any work on a failed or failing hard drive makes sense, and then the purpose is not to restore it regular use. In any situation other than data recovery, the labor cost of a repair attempt will exceed the cost of replacing the drive with a new one.
I said “for all intents and purposes”, not “under all circumstances without exception”. Data recovery (as a result of a failure to back up properly) is the ONLY situation where any work on a failed or failing hard drive makes sense, and then the purpose is not to restore it regular use. In any situation other than data recovery, the labor cost of a repair attempt will exceed the cost of replacing the drive with a new one.Well as a non native english speaker I do count "backup of data" as a valid purpose to repair a hdd, other cases indeed it makes no economical sense also regarding reliability etc.
But as far as reliability goes, then the same goes for instance any electrical device having suffered severe ESD due to lightning or whatever and debatable also any T&M device that has suffered damaged on its measurements inputs, at least if you need the data to be exact and reliable, unless done properly , recalibrated and certified by the manufacturer.
True. They can fail as anything mechanical, electric , pneumatic etc can fail.
I don't think harddrives are particular worse if taken care of (used) properly.
In datacenters using enterprise grade harddisks that are 24/7 on in temperature and humidity controlled environment 99% if not higher of the harddisks are preventively changed after three or four years without any failure.
Personally from the 74 harddisks I ever owned I have one fail and one has a SMART entry which is not good. A lot of these harddisks were never 24/7 on, were moved, shaken, temperature cycles, lots of power on/off cycles etc.
You probably know the backblaze reports, they reveal that the AFR of hdds is equal to ssds now who had put their money on that ?
https://www.dpreview.com/news/7921185885/backblaze-reveals-failure-rates-for-hard-drives-in-2021-releases-an-ssd-report-for-the-first-time
Perhaps not surprisingly the failures have occurred in drives 7-12 years old. New enough to be relatively high capacity with tight tolerances and less margins and old enough to have seen significant use.