Problems with external hard drives

[David-G]

I am struggling to maintain adequate backup, as I keep getting problems with external hard drives. My drives are the "portable" variety, with power supplied from the USB lead. I now have five of these, two Seagate and three Toshiba. A few months ago one of the Seagates became "invisible"; it is not recognised when you plug it into a computer. Then one of the Toshibas developed a problem where about 10% of the files are corrupt and cannot be read; I bought my fifth drive, another Toshiba (2Tb) to replace this one. Backing up onto this new one last night, a similar problem has occurred; about 10% of the files cannot be read. So now I have five drives, of which only two work properly.

This is an appalling reliability rate. I do not carry these drives around, they are not thrown about; they just migrate from the cupboard to the kitchen table and back. I shall now have to replace this latest drive as a matter of urgency.

Does anyone have any useful recommendations as to how I can choose a reliable drive? Are some makes better than others? Are these portable ones fundamentally unreliable? Can Forum members recommend any drives which have served them well?

[MrGongGong]

All drives will fail eventually

I've been using WD external drives for a few years and they seem to work well for me, reasonably affordable (2TB for less than £100) and simple black boxes.
I'm now using Carbon Copy Cloner (not sure if you get that for PC?) to make bootable backups and occasionally make an extra backup if i'm working on something critical.

Have you tried the "invisible" ones on another computer ?

[Hornspieler]

I am struggling to maintain adequate backup, as I keep getting problems with external hard drives. My drives are the "portable" variety, with power supplied from the USB lead. I now have five of these, two Seagate and three Toshiba. A few months ago one of the Seagates became "invisible"; it is not recognised when you plug it into a computer. Then one of the Toshibas developed a problem where about 10% of the files are corrupt and cannot be read; I bought my fifth drive, another Toshiba (2Tb) to replace this one. Backing up onto this new one last night, a similar problem has occurred; about 10% of the files cannot be read. So now I have five drives, of which only two work properly.

This is an appalling reliability rate. I do not carry these drives around, they are not thrown about; they just migrate from the cupboard to the kitchen table and back. I shall now have to replace this latest drive as a matter of urgency.

Does anyone have any useful recommendations as to how I can choose a reliable drive? Are some makes better than others? Are these portable ones fundamentally unreliable? Can Forum members recommend any drives which have served them well?

I have a Hitachi 1Terrabyte hard drive with usb connection to the mainframe which has proved totally reliable.

All the data from my two computers, plus thousands of photographs and all of my music recordings are backed up on this drive and it is still only half full. Invaluable also for transferring data from one computer to the other, so I not only have everything backed up on the hard drive, but "permanent data" such as lpeg and bitmap pictures is backed up in two places.

The Hitachi cost me around £60.00 from a local dealer and has been without problems since I bought it in 2009.

HS

BTW I defragment all of my hard drives at least once a month. That includes the Hitachi

[Dave2002]

Tricky! I have Toshiba, Samsung, Buffalo portable drives, plus a few more, and earlier less portable La Cie drives and a fairly recent chunkier model Seagate drive.

I haven't had major problems since one highly recommended WD drive failed within 10 days of purchase. That was my first external USB drive around a decade ago.

Your drives are becoming invisible, and one shows signs of corruption - what OS and computers are you using?
How much storage do you need, and what are you trying to protect? if it's "only" work files, chances are that they don't take up much space, so maybe even an SSD "drive" (say 64 Gbytes) would now be usable and affordable. If, OTOH you hava a huge audio and video collection then SSDs will still probably be too expensive. You could try Blu Ray for archiving/backup of media files.

No easy answer, I'm afraid. Drives becoming invisible may be a simple thing, and the data may still be intact, but corrupted files doesn't sound good. Apart from hardware failure, software glitches and viruses may cause some of the symptoms you mention.

In some versions of Mac OS X, drives don't always show up on the Desktop without tweaking the settings - that can be fixed. Data corruption is much more serious.

[David-G]

Thanks MrGG and HS.

All drives will fail eventually

But hopefully, after quite a number of years. This latest one is failing only 8 weeks after I bought it.

Have you tried the "invisible" ones on another computer ?

I have, with no result, unfortunately. I am going to get my computer "boffin" to look at it to see if the data can be recovered.

[MrGongGong]

I have, with no result, unfortunately. I am going to get my computer "boffin" to look at it to see if the data can be recovered.

Good luck with that
Data recovery can be a rather hideously expensive business

[johnb]

David-G, the fact that you are having problems with a number of external hard drives might mean that there is insufficient power being supplied via the USB port on your computer. This is not uncommon.

As a first step I would strongly recommend trying each of the problem HDDs with the power supplied by a mains adaptor, rather than via the USB lead. If you don't have mains adaptors for the HDDs - try each of them connected to a powered USB hub.

Also, don't take it as fact that all of the files are corrupted. If the problems are due to insufficient USB power it might just be that the HDDs are not receiving sufficient power to be able to properly read the files, although if there was the same power problem when you were writing the files then they might well be corrupt.

It might be foolish of me but I always use a mains adaptor for my HDDs.

As far as reliable HDDs are concerned, these days I always buy the HDD and enclosure separately so I can choose a low power ("Green") internal HD. Different people have different experiences but all the WD "Green" internal hard drives I have had have been very reliable.

(The only external HD failure I have had was about 8 years ago - a WD MyBook which overheated and fried the electronics. When I took it apart I found that it contained an enterprise grade HD, i.e. not a desktop HD but a much more expensive one designed for intensive use in servers etc - the problem was that it also had high power consumption which caused heat dissipation problems. At the time I thought the internal HD was dead and, because of my actions, I lost all the files. It turned out that the HD was perfectly all right and I still use it for the odd thing today.)

[Dave2002]

Good luck with that
Data recovery can be a rather hideously expensive business

Quite!

That's why the cost of additional hard drives is often worth it, with multiple copies of data files stored in/on different locations. An obvious example is of a student's dissertation or thesis - the penalties for not completing a degree, and also after having paid £000s in student fees are very siginificant compared to a few £00s of hard drive and other kit. OTOH it's not worth spending much to safeguard a ripped (ripped off?) copy of a £5 CD.

[amateur51]

Quite!

That's why the cost of additional hard drives is often worth it, with multiple copies of data files stored in/on different locations. An obvious example is of a student's dissertation or thesis - the penalties for not completing a degree, and also after having paid £000s in student fees are very siginificant compared to a few £00s of hard drive and other kit. OTOH it's not worth spending much to safeguard a ripped (ripped off?) copy of a £5 CD.

Don't you people know about carbon paper?

[Dave2002]

Don't you people know about carbon paper?

Won't work in many universities and HE establishments nowadays as electronic submission and also marking (**** stupid idea ****) is now becoming the norm, nay even a requirement.

[David-G]

David-G, the fact that you are having problems with a number of external hard drives might mean that there is insufficient power being supplied via the USB port on your computer. This is not uncommon.

As a first step I would strongly recommend trying each of the problem HDDs with the power supplied by a mains adaptor, rather than via the USB lead. If you don't have mains adaptors for the HDDs - try each of them connected to a powered USB hub.

Also, don't take it as fact that all of the files are corrupted. If the problems are due to insufficient USB power it might just be that the HDDs are not receiving sufficient power to be able to properly read the files, although if there was the same power problem when you were writing the files then they might well be corrupt.

It might be foolish of me but I always use a mains adaptor for my HDDs.

As far as reliable HDDs are concerned, these days I always buy the HDD and enclosure separately so I can choose a low power ("Green") internal HD. Different people have different experiences but all the WD "Green" internal hard drives I have had have been very reliable.

(The only external HD failure I have had was about 8 years ago - a WD MyBook which overheated and fried the electronics. When I took it apart I found that it contained an enterprise grade HD, i.e. not a desktop HD but a much more expensive one designed for intensive use in servers etc - the problem was that it also had high power consumption which caused heat dissipation problems. At the time I thought the internal HD was dead and, because of my actions, I lost all the files. It turned out that the HD was perfectly all right and I still use it for the odd thing today.)

Johnb, that is a most interesting observation. I have been surprised that I seemed to have been singled out for such unlucky experiences with my hard drives, and your suggestion would provide a logical explanation of my difficulties.

A number of questions come to mind, and I would be grateful for your thoughts on these.

(1) Presumably my first move should be to acquire a powered hub, and to see whether with this the problem files reappear?

(2) If they don't, do you think the drive is rescuable? In other words, might the lack of adequate power in some way have damaged it? Should I discard it and buy a new one?

(3) Or might this one be alright (with a powered hub) if I delete all the data and start again (or perhaps reformat and start again)?

(4) If I am copying from hard drive A to hard drive B, would it be ok to attach the two drives to a single powered hub?

I would be very grateful for your thoughts on these points.

[David-G]

Good luck with that
Data recovery can be a rather hideously expensive business

I am not proposing to spend a lot of money! Just to see whether maybe the actual disc might perhaps be alright, and could be used if for instance transferred to a new enclosure.

[MrGongGong]

Won't work in many universities and HE establishments nowadays as electronic submission and also marking (**** stupid idea ****) is now becoming the norm, nay even a requirement.

This is a problem (though a bit OT?) IMV

This year I ended up printing out students work so I could read and scrawl all over it
also
for subjects that aren't linguistically based it places too much emphasis on the written word (which IS important). In my experience some of the University systems don't allow for more multimedia approaches, so what would be a fascinating piece of writing with audio examples embedded becomes a piece of dry text.

[Dave2002]

This is a problem (though a bit OT?) IMV

This year I ended up printing out students work so I could read and scrawl all over it
also
for subjects that aren't linguistically based it places too much emphasis on the written word (which IS important). In my experience some of the University systems don't allow for more multimedia approaches, so what would be a fascinating piece of writing with audio examples embedded becomes a piece of dry text.

I suspect that this could form the basis of a "fascinating" thread, though in the meantime we have to consider how to write a composition for dead and dying disc drives.

Presumably (ha) you had to submit your proposed work to students to a committee for approval, and establish marking criteria in advance. How to be creative, eh!

[MrGongGong]

I suspect that this could form the basis of a "fascinating" thread, though in the meantime we have to consider how to write a composition for dead and dying disc drives.

Lots of that about

Maybe the Bach is more your thing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGSTYvx5c78