Hard Disk Crash, My First and it Sucks..............

I've found Apple's Time Machine work's great. I used it to restore my existing MacBook to a new MacBook from a Backup drive. Extremely simple. A thing I do with back up drives (if mechanical) is listen for noises or less than smooth operation. Often times a drive gives warnings that it performance is declining. They don't last forever. A new drive is a cheap investment.

 

Systems have gotten so big that, it is often impractical to actually create backups. Sometimes backups depend on how much money you want to invest.

One of the systems, that I use to work on, had a 50 TB file server. The server had 50 - 1TB disk drives that were configured Raid-Z. If any disk had a problem it would shut down the disk and let you know. The server would slow down a little bit, because it had to recreate the data from the other disks. Then all you needed to do was pull out the bad disk and put in a new one. The system would automatically rebuild the disk put it back into operation. I worked with that system for several years and I don't think I ever had a problem. But I had a stack of replacement disks sitting on the shelf, just in case.

 

Most data sets are pretty static. QRZ, for example - a relatively static database of licensed FCC amateurs. Licenses get added, deleted, updated, etc., but day over day the vast bulk of the records stays the same. Some add or update their page, but it's a fraction of a percent on any given day. Same for the forums - the longer it's running, the bigger it gets BUT most of the data is static as threads become dormant. Incremental and Differential backups handle this type of data very well.

I used to run Arcserve on Novell servers back in the 90's, and a full backup could take 10 hours or more, and had to be done on weekends. Now I run Veeam on Vmware with much larger datasets (multiple TB) and my backups run in 20 min.

 

You had a 250 GB drive in a laptop, circa 2011? Wow.. I mean WOW!

 

I cried when my ST251 40 Meg Seagate drive crashed. It was $400 USD new.

It was one of the first auto park head drives. No need to enter the park command.

I was able to retrieve the MFM data after getting the heads released so it would spin up.

My beer had so many tears in it that it was salty.

I think those drives are $20 now, And still have the auto park problem.

 

I don't know about WOW. I have a HP G62 laptop that I bought in January 2011, when I retired. It has a 300 GB disk drive in it. At work we had been using 1TB drives for a long time.

The thing that wore out, on the G62, was the keyboard. I seem to be tough on keyboards. My fingers tend to wear the lettering off of the keys. That includes the raised index on the F and J keys. It's a good thing my fingers know where all the keys are. It's interesting what you type, when your fingers are just one key to the right or left. New keyboards are pretty cheap and easy to replace.

I have a newer laptop (HP Beats) that has a 900 GB disk drive. This one has back lit keys. But I wore that keyboard out too. Again, I just bought a new keyboard and swapped out the old one.

 

Huh? There haven’t been MFM drives for decades and heads have been load/unload (LUL) off the discs for well more than 10 years. The old parking method was CSS, Contact Start Stop, i.e., with a reserved and specially textured landing zone at the ID of the discs which prevented heads sticking to the discs.

 

I think they will pay YOU $20 to take such a drive! My original ST-225 in a home-brew 8088-turbo (10 MHz) only cost $229.00. Times have obviously changed, when a 1 TB drive goes for as little as $39.00!

P.S. My "turbo" was truly unique. It had 2 5.25" drives, AND a 3.5" floppy added; not your typical 'puter.

 

Using Acronis I've had to restored 4 drives over time and nary an issue. Best practice would be to image your drive, then test restore to a spare drive and see how it works.

...DOUG
KD4MOJ

 

That's a good idea! I will try that and figure out what I was doing wrong. Thanks!

...............Bob