SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

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Algenon5
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

The price on that 2TB hard drive has dropped again to $79.95 USD.
The second link has international shipping info.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... =M261-8234

http://www.tigerdirect.com/sectors/help/index.asp

Al
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Algenon5
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

Well, that didn't last long! The price just bumped up to $99.95 USD.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... =M261-8234
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Jerry
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Jerry »

I'm a little late to this discussion, but I feel compelled to comment because there are people like me...

<personal crap>
A long time ago (early 2001), I did sustain a multiple drive failure on different machines and lost 30GB of data as well as a backup drive that was only used for the purposes of backing up, (then being removed from the machine). Since then I've maintained at least 7 copies of important files like receipts, tech docs, personal files (not niche related), etc. I've only recently started collecting & buying clips so my library is VERY small (under 2GB).
</personal crap>

Anyway because of the prevalence of drive failures I've experienced over the years I have actually setup a RAID array to store files. While its a godsend when there's a drive failure it still doesn't stop user error. So, this may be another bit to add to your storage so you can keep your files and not having to worry about losing them. Plus, RAID in several instances will increase file read speed. Most new boards nowadays actually have a RAID controller integrated into the board but I would actually recommend to use a separate add-in controller because your new computer a few years from now may not recognize your RAID array. If you want true performance, get a card that has its own processor, memory & battery if you can swing it. It wont replace your backups but it will keep your collection from going "poof" from a drive failure, and you can still get your data. :)
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by smudger »

Having never had a hard drive fail on me, Jerry, I need to ask what make you are buying so I can avoid them.
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Jerry
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What is your main fetish?: A few... Shootings, (arrows, bullets, darts, beanbags, lightning bolts, watermelons whatever), stabbing and body play/posing. And more innocently, wetlook or "splosh" as its called elsewhere.
Why do you want to join this forum?: I want to see the content and to keep up with what is produced, what others like and to be in the company of other people who share my fetishes. Growing up I thought I was the only one with these fetishes.
Referral: google searches and seen FF mentioned on other related sites.
Location: Ohio
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Jerry »

It spans all makes, even old brands. Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Connor, IBM. However I've noticed that Seagate has a lower failure rate. My "experience" in 2001 was "Western Digital". Had I had a RAID system then, I wouldn't have lost anything.

To be fair though, since that experience in 2001 I have always kept important data on different drives, on different partitions, on different machines. However, now I only have a single copy of my data now that I've reduced my computer count.

Also to be fair, I've done my fair share of computer repair and collecting "roadside specials", or just really "cheap" computers from yard sales. At one time I've had well over 100 drives sitting on my shelves. Unfortunately I've never created a chart and kept count of brands and drive series.

Right now I buy "old" HP/Compaq SCSI drives and out of 50 ive bought over the last 5 years, 2 of them ended up dying after heavy use, and had another start reporting "SMART" errors after a power hiccup. As of right now, I do have another drive that is reporting imminent failure due to spindle start time, but its been fine for almost a year.
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Algenon5
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

I'm late responding to your post, Jerry, sorry. Somehow it got lost in the shuffle.

The lessons from your experience seem to be don't buy salvaged or refurbished drives. Stick with name brands like Seagate, Western Digital, Fantom and OEM packaged Toshiba. Fantom and Western Digital have tech support should you need it. I don't know about Toshiba and Seagate.

A word about so-called "green drives" that save power by automatically going into dormant mode when not being used. They have slower disc speeds (3,500 to 5,000 rpm) which means they are a bit slower to respond when first called upon. My 2TB Western Digital green drive when first clicked on takes about five seconds to get up to speed. Thereafter it responds just as quickly as my PC's internal drive.

THE CARE AND FEEDING OF GREEN DRIVES: Some green drives seem to be sensitive
to handling. However you shouldn't have any problems if you follow these two simple
rules:
> Do not physically move a green drive while it is operating.
> Only cut power to or switch off a green drive when it is in dormant mode. (Feel the
case. If you can't detect a slight vibration, it is in dormant mode.)

BASIC RULES FOR ALL EXTERNAL DRIVES:
> An ex-drive's power supply should be plugged into a good surge protector.
> Do not fill up an ex-drive to more than 80% of its USABLE capacity. Actual usable
capacity will be about 15% less than the manufacturer's advertised capacity.
> If an ex-drive gets heavy use such as the frequent adding and removal of files,
editing files, etcetera, it should be defragmented regularly. If an ex-drive is only
used for storage and playback, defrags aren't necessary.
> Green drives or not, ex-drives aren't meant to be banged around. Physically handle
all ex-drives with care.

IF YOU SMELL SMOKE:
Don't call me!

Al
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Jerry
Posts: 167
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2012 10:52 pm
What is your main fetish?: A few... Shootings, (arrows, bullets, darts, beanbags, lightning bolts, watermelons whatever), stabbing and body play/posing. And more innocently, wetlook or "splosh" as its called elsewhere.
Why do you want to join this forum?: I want to see the content and to keep up with what is produced, what others like and to be in the company of other people who share my fetishes. Growing up I thought I was the only one with these fetishes.
Referral: google searches and seen FF mentioned on other related sites.
Location: Ohio
Contact:

Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Jerry »

Algenon5 wrote:The lessons from your experience seem to be don't buy salvaged or refurbished drives. Stick with name brands like Seagate, Western Digital, Fantom and OEM packaged Toshiba. Fantom and Western Digital have tech support should you need it. I don't know about Toshiba and Seagate.
Actually, in every case where I "lost" data to a failed drive, the drive was a name brand and purchased new. These failed without warning, and dealing with tech support after a drive fails is just like closing the barn door after the horse runs out. As I speak, I have a 1TB drive I bought and only used for 8 months that developed a VERY high reallocated sector count then it was put out of service. Never bothered to contact Maxtor about replacement. Maxtor owns Seagate nowadays. As far as roadside special computers, I simply use them as "disposable" machines or clean them up and pass them on to people who want a computer but don't have one.

I use "old" server grade hardware and since using such hardware I've had few problems hardware wise. I've had more drives fail, strictly because I own far more of them and since I'm using higher end hardware along with a battery backed cache RAID setup, nothing gets lost when one does choke. When my controller starts complaining about the drive, it gets replaced even if it is still in working order. Looking at a constant red flashing light is not fun. :shake:

Also, there are only a few (4) plants that physically manufacture hard drives. Which after the japan tsunami & meltdown put all but one plant offline which is why the price of drives skyrocketed.

Algenon5 wrote:A word about so-called "green drives" that save power by automatically going into dormant mode when not being used. They have slower disc speeds (3,500 to 5,000 rpm) which means they are a bit slower to respond when first called upon. My 2TB Western Digital green drive when first clicked on takes about five seconds to get up to speed. Thereafter it responds just as quickly as my PC's internal drive.

THE CARE AND FEEDING OF GREEN DRIVES: Some green drives seem to be sensitive
to handling. However you shouldn't have any problems if you follow these two simple
rules:
> Do not physically move a green drive while it is operating.
> Only cut power to or switch off a green drive when it is in dormant mode. (Feel the
case. If you can't detect a slight vibration, it is in dormant mode.)
I've never bothered with so called "green drives", so thanks for the info. Also, I've also started disabling the power save features in windows to keep the drives running 24x7, but this hardware is designed to run 24x7x365. Google published a study a couple years ago about drive failure, and they have found that drives are more reliable "warm" (100F-125F) than cold. Keep a drive too cold and its internal thermal calculator cant cope if the temp gets too low, or way too high. The spinning disk itself expands when it gets warm, thus changing the geography of the disk and the heads have to know where to go. SSDs don't suffer from thermal expansion like this.

Algenon5 wrote:BASIC RULES FOR ALL EXTERNAL DRIVES:
> An ex-drive's power supply should be plugged into a good surge protector.
> Do not fill up an ex-drive to more than 80% of its USABLE capacity. Actual usable
capacity will be about 15% less than the manufacturer's advertised capacity.
> If an ex-drive gets heavy use such as the frequent adding and removal of files,
editing files, etcetera, it should be defragmented regularly. If an ex-drive is only
used for storage and playback, defrags aren't necessary.
> Green drives or not, ex-drives aren't meant to be banged around. Physically handle
all ex-drives with care.
Excellent Points...
> All electronics should be plugged into a surge protector. Also remember almost all protectors can only take ONE surge, then they offer no protection. Only buy protectors with a "protected when lit" indicator and throw away all strips where this indicator is not lit.
> Manufacturers display space in base10 while, the OS displays it in base2. This is because manufactures count 1GB as 1000MB but in base2, its 1GB = 1024MB. This is why your 1TB (base10) drive is only about 931GB (base2). Also, space is set aside for reallocation. This way when the drive finds a bad sector, it tags it then moves the data to another location specifically for this purpose. This is done by the drive regardless what the OS says. you can find how many sectors have been reallocated by using a SMART monitor. If this number starts growing suddenly, you have a disk that is failing on a hardware level (click of death).
> Excellent advice. Also to add, if you're using a disk for large files only, when you format change the "Allocation unit size" to 4096 or larger. Read throughput is higher at the cost of becoming inefficient with files smaller than the allocation unit size. Also DO NOT, repeat DO NOT defrag a SSD.
> Excellent advice as well. Inside the drive is a glass disk with a glass head with an electromagnet flying microns over the glass disk at 150mph and trying to decipher the orientation of the magnetic field. They're delicate. ;) FYI: reading at 150MB /sec, the head reads 1,200,000,000 bits (1's and 0's per second).

Algenon5 wrote:IF YOU SMELL SMOKE:
Don't call me!
F it... let it burn...

the roof, the roof, the roof, is on fire
we don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
burn motherfucker burn :twisted:
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Algenon5
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

Jerry wrote:Also DO NOT, repeat DO NOT defrag a SSD.
>
Thought I should make clear what Jerry refers to here are solid state
drives that are not a main part of this discussion, which primarily concerns
the introduction of relative novices to the use of hard disc external drives.

To be honest, I don't have any personal experience with solid state
drives, but I know from the experiences of others that SSDs aren't
failure proof.

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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by smudger »

I would predict that by ten years' time the mechanical marvel that is the HDD will be no more. It is only the limited capacity and relatively high price of SSDs that bugs them right now. And I am sure we all remember that the same was true of HDDs not that long ago.
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

smudger wrote:I would predict that by ten years' time the mechanical marvel that is the HDD will be no more. It is only the limited capacity and relatively high price of SSDs that bugs them right now. And I am sure we all remember that the same was true of HDDs not that long ago.
Undoubtedly true. Moreover, new data storage technologies are in development
that with their speed and capacity will make today's SSDs totally obsolete.

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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

Are hard drive prices beginning to fall?

Recent checks of sale prices of internal and external HDs at Tiger Direct
and Geeks.com seem to indicate the HD shortage caused by Japan's
earthquake/tsunami may be coming to an end. Hopefully this will eventually mean
the return of $80 2TB external HDs. Current prices are in the $120 range, which is
down from a high of $160 USD.

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Algenon5
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

I've been asked for a bit more info on shutting down green drives.
To begin with, under normal circumstances you shouldn't have to.
When a green drive is in dormant mode it draws less than 20 miliwatts
of DC power, and the disc stops rotating. Therefore it can be safely
and economically be left operating and on call 24-7-365. However,
if you need to completely shut down you green drive, here is the
procedure:

HOW TO SAFELY SHUT DOWN A GREEN DRIVE.
> Close all files, folders and applications being run by the drive.
> Wait until the drive goes into dormant mode. Depending on the
drive's make and operating circumstances, this can take from two
to fifteen minutes. Some drives have status LEDs which indicate
when they are in dormant mode. If yours does not, feel the case.
If you cannot detect a slight vibration, it is in dormant mode.
> Now you may switch the drive off and disconnect its power
supply.

What happens if you don't do all of this stuff, and just unplug the
damn thing? Probably nothing. However, repeatedly switching off
a green drive while it is in full operating mode can potentially
damage portions of the disc, and could eventually result in total
disc failure. I pays to play safe.

Al
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Algenon5
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

Prices continue to drop. Tiger Direct just put up a
Seagate 1.5TB green drive for $79.95 USD.
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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

The price dropped again! That Seagate drive
now goes for $59.95 USD. I hope it lasts.

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Re: SAFEGUARDING YOUR PRECIOUS VIDEOS

Post by Algenon5 »

I've been asked what is this formatting that Jerry mentioned all about?
Actually it isn't something that will probably concern the average user. Most
external hard drives sold today (FIG.1) are "plug & play," which means they
come already formatted. I have plug & play drives and drives I have formatted,
and if there is any performance difference between the two, it's been too slight
for me to notice.

If you want to format a drive, you will need to buy an INTERNAL hard drive
(FIG. 2 shown without dust plate) and physically install it in an external drive
case (FIG. 3). This is a simple procedure which takes about five minutes. Plug
the drive case into one of your computer's USB ports, and follow the drive's
formatting instructions.

WARNING: Do not under any circumstances remove a hard
drive's dust plate! If you do, you might as well dump it in the trash.

Al

P.S. I'm surprised at how much interest this thread has generated.
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