While we are on the subject of hard drives here are some very useful bits o=
f software some of you might be interested in:
Something worth having around on the PC is 'diskcheckup' from PassMark.
http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm
This neat bit of software gives access to the SMART info (Self Monitoring A=
nalysis & Reporting Technology).
Which can give a warning of impending doom and time to backup, if you have =
not already, that drive.
It works with IDE and SATA drives but not USB or FireWire as the SMART data=
is not recognised on those systems, or raided drives either.
On Mac's the main drive SMART status is shown in DiscUtility and a regular =
check there is worth carrying out.
While I am at it there is a very good bit of software for the PC called Dri=
veImage XML by Runtime.
http://www.runtime.org/products.htm
Which is very good for making clones of your PC's hard drives, system and d=
ata.
For the Mac there is Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombitch software.
http://www.runtime.org/products.htm
Or my personal favorite SuperDuper by Shirt Pocket software.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
Having these pieces of software around can help in stopping a good day turn=
ing very bad through a crashed drive.
I hope some find this useful.
Phil
----- Original Message ----
From: Rob Danielson <>
To:
Sent: Monday, 6 August, 2007 5:17:11 PM
Subject: [Nature Recordists] Hard Drive Precautions (was Flash based IDE dr=
ives...
At 7:17 AM -0700 8/6/07, Scott Fraser wrote:
>Yes, an ominous clicking or chattering can be telling you it's the
>beginning of the end, (or it may already be too late.) Unfortunately,
>many of us put our drives in soundproof isolation, so we aren't
>always aware of the death cough.
I nurse the woes of 150+ students with personal
200-750GB external drives. We feel that the
top-end, "Mercury" OWC external enclosures have
proven themselves to be superior to other
enclosure options and even a few of these have
failed through the years. Of course, the drive
itself can be moved out of a faulty enclosure and
into a new one.
I agree that being alert to odd behavior of any
kind is probably the best protection against
loss. Disk Warrior fixes anything in the earliest
stages 99.9% of the time. There are several ways
a volume can become un-mountable and unreadable
long before hardware failure. One is a corrupt
file that cannot be deleted even with the most
stringent utility tools.
Partitioning a large drive, which essentially
creates separate directories or volumes, isolates
any serious or potential problem to only one part
of the drive. It also improves drive performance
and makes the drive contents easier to organize
and catalogue with no sacrifice of storage
capacity.
Its seems to be very important with Mac OS X to
initialize or better yes, "Zero-Out" format the
drive and not use the FAT 32 format that often
comes stock with USB/FireWire external
enclosures. After we initialize or format a brand
new new or old drive, we create four partitions
as standard practice. We get about 2-3 disasters
per year but, so far, none on drives we handle
this way, knock on wood. Rob D.
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