| Author | Message | ||
     Court |
Most of you are too young to recall the admonishment on the punch cards in the days I was doing FORTRAN and COBOL programming in college. But . . hey . . .al tech stuff has it's weaknesses. I recently picked up 4 LaCie 4TB Ruggedized RAID hard drives to carry with me for various work and personal stuff. These compliment a wall of 6TB LaCie drives mounted in a Pelican case at home. Well . . . the last one I bought has seem working flawlessly until I plugged it into an iMac today. Nothing. This evening I plugged it into a MacAir. Nothing. Aft3er going through the array of my technical skills . . pretty much consisting of "plug wiggling". I was at my wit's end. Then I tried the tried and true method . . a light rap with a knuckle on the side. It fired right up, lights a flashing, and worked fine. I was going to leave it at that . . . then began to think . . .this is not (at about $400) an inexpensive drive and . . well, you shouldn't have to knock a hard drive on the temple to make it work, Plus . . . the biggie. . . there's 4TB of dots and dashes roaming about there. Anyway . . . I go on Amazon to see when I ordered it and see a "click here for our tech folks to call you immediately". i clicked. Alicia called. Guess what . . . she sends me back to check the order to find out when the "window for return" closes. . . . October 1, 2016. Home run . . in my book. She's already processed it and sent me the return, prepaid, label. Question . . . would you . . when it started working . . . forgot about it or tried to return it? Man . . even though it's all backed up on another drive . . I'd hate to loose 4TB. Challenge now is going to be to remove the plastic nameplate I superglued to the case. But . . .I'll figure that out. Yikes. Anyway . . . Shout out to Amazon. Court | ||
| Reepicheep |
The whole point of a hard drive is to store and return data. If it would get better by "wiggling the cord" I might keep it, assuming that it is just a connector issue and in a pinch I could take apart the ruggedized case and get one last read of the data off of the thing. But if it was an "internal" issue, I would not risk it. I'd replace it. Also consider that you want it intact long enough to erase it before you return it. Otherwise you would need a mechanical destruction, which could make for some awkward questions upon return (I have found a hatchet to be most effective). | ||
| Pwnzor |
Amazon Prime = Best online customer service anywhere. Period. Faulty Electronics get ZERO tolerance from me. I do a lot of research before I buy anything electronic that costs more than say, $50... as I'm sure you do. Lately, I've made the move to solid state devices. Tablets, laptops, everything... going forward the only moving parts will be cooling fans whenever possible. | ||
| Court |
>>>Lately, I've made the move to solid state devices. Headed there. The SSD technology is roughly akin to the battery in the electric car. . . . close, poised for amazing developments, but not quite there yet. But . . having learned the heartbreak of losing a 500mb drive and the cost of recovery . . . I have an array of 15 LacIe professional Thunderbolt2 drives all daisy chained together and (hey, it's NYC) read to "leave home" on a moments notice. That is going to be plenty enough for me until the time when the 64TB Enterprise SSD rack mount becomes available. Interesting to watch LaCie's website . . . they can't make the 4TB and 6TB fast enough to keep them in stock. With the advent of cameras firing 8 fps of RAW images approaching 50MB each . . . (and I can't imagine what the video kids are using) storage is the name of the game. I've also kept, and integrated a bank of old (including Buell) hard drives and am always amazed at what a Spotlight search may bring up from old racing budgets to massive Excel build sheet files. It's about time to upgrade the iPad and laptop (I'm using 2 MacAirs on the road . . an 11" and a 13" which are pretty much nothing more than a display for the Thunderbolt drives. We've come a long way since I bought my first digital camera that came with a 2mb storage CF card. My task, today, is to hook the subject drive to my main machine at home and start a 4TB transfer onto a 6TB desktop drive . . . then start a DOD wipe and then try to remove (it looks like fingernail polish with Acetone is the way to conquer superglue) the attached metal ID tag. The comfort is that all the data, with the exception of the last several days of photos from Los Angeles and Rock Tavern, NY are safely backed up. And . . .hooray for Alicia at Amazon. | ||
| Reepicheep |
I've lost two solid state hard drives, and when they failed, they failed hard and fast. They are fast, quiet, and power efficient. And in theory less susceptible to damage. But in current practice, for normal laptop use, I would not assume they are more reliable than a mechanical drive. That will probably change in the next 5 years. | ||
| Hootowl |
Knock on wood, I've never lost an ssd. I've come to detest spindle drives. Until very recently, I put up with spinning platters (with their heads flying a hair's breath over the media, held aloft only by the air streaming under it - a disaster waiting to happen) due to their cost per gigabyte advantage, but I recently picked up a 1 tb ssd for my esx host for just under $250, so I'm pretty sure I'm done with old fashioned hard drives. | ||
| Tq_freak |
I've lost two solid state hard drives, and when they failed, they failed hard and fast. I agree, I had a 250gig Crucial SSD fair in my work desktop after about 3 years of service and upgraded to a 500gig Samsung ssd and its been perfect (knock on wood) When the SSD went, that was it. Our IT guy was able some how able to get it running barely long enough to get everything off but I had everything backed up to the server anyway. it looks like fingernail polish with Acetone is the way to conquer superglue) the attached metal ID tag That's what i was going to requirement. Acetone. Stuff is great. Just be careful because it will take the paint right off that case too along with the super glue | ||
| Ratbuell |
Unless they send you the replacement first. Then just put your tagged case on the new drive and send the new case back wrapped around the dead drive. | ||
| Court |
The case is inseparable on this "ruggedized" drive. I have "geolocator" tags on all my hard drives. I have a bit of a memory lapse in my failing age . . surprised I'm not running for President . . and like being able to find where I last had the drive. I think . . . my memory is foggy from the concussion. Hahahahaha | ||
| Teeps |
FORTRAN! When I started work at Honda we had a DATA GENERAL computer that ran our database program, that was written in FORTRAN. The hard drive platters were a couple feet in diameter. I forget how much they held, but it was not much. oh how far computers have come in 30 years... | ||
| Court |
Those were the days . . calculating all sorts of fun things like the price of pizza per square inch . . . . Hahahahaha . . . and you wonder why I lost my draft deferment. :-) | ||
| Greg_e |
I would not have bought a LaCie drive in the first place. We tried using them at work and when we saw a 25 percent failure rate and the hoops the students had to jump through to get a warranty replacement, it just wasn't worth the extra cost. There were banned from my network and I won't use them again. | ||
| Court |
Intersting. I've had, until this event, nothing but good luck with them. But . . . I am looking at some other options and am all ears. The 6TB units I have, so far, have been bulletproof. After having a couple Seagates fail I tried the LaCie. I still have 3 Seagate 1TB. | ||
| Pwnzor |
*sigh*.... here we go. Let the old-computer equipment thread begin in earnest! Atari 400XL, 110bps half-duplex pulse-dialing modem, cassette tape recorder... 32kb RAM... b&w 13" tv for a monitor. Good times... | ||
| Zane |
Having a drive crash is even worse than dropping your card deck. Ever do that? | ||
| Court |
>>>Ever do that? I did. I had, until a couple of years ago, 2 cases of KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY . . complete with the purple Willie the Wildcat . . punch cards. I used to go to the engineering building to keypunch at 2am when the crowds were thinner. | ||
| Hootowl |
I worked on a computer in the Navy, part of my avionics test bench, that used magnetic core memory. First cruise I was on, the thing would crash every time they launched an aircraft. We didn't get much work done during flight ops. | ||
| Sifo |
Having a drive crash is even worse than dropping your card deck. Ever do that? I did that once with a deck that was about 5 inches high. It fanned out nice and uniform for about 10 feet until it hit a table leg and the rest spun off in multiple pieces. No sequence numbers on that deck either. I just tried my best to piece it all back together again. Damned if it didn't work just fine! Then there's pulling the bits and pieces of a card out of the reader and trying to duplicate what was on that card from the shreds. Wonderful days in the middle of the night! | ||
| Sifo |
I had all the power go out one night in the computer room, except for the emergency lighting. That wasn't supposed to happen. Turns out someone left their young child to amuse themselves in the warehouse. The UPS was out there and had a red button that said EMERGENCY PULL. The kid read PULL and pulled! Turns out you have to call IBM to come out and reset that damned thing! | ||
| Reepicheep |
I was working in the computer lab when the last card punch machine owned by the University of Cincinnati was sold to Earl's Scrap Hauling for $50. Earl over paid. We still had to use the big disk packs for the Modcomp at GE Aircraft Engines as late as the early 90's. I had to fix Fortran programs that were tens of thousands of lines long, and that would take most of the day to compile. They would tell the interns that you could tell which disk pack had been recently erased by feeling which was lighter. | ||
| Reindog |
Hollerith card decks were notoriously prone to entropy testing. A quick recovery method was to use a magic marker and draw a diagonal line on the side of the deck. One could see the relative position of an individual card in the deck. | ||
| Natexlh1000 |
You guys would love this blog: Calculating a Mandlbrot in only 12 minutes http://www.righto.com/2015/03/12-minute-mandelbrot -fractals-on-50.html also, bitcoin mining with the same machine: http://www.righto.com/2015/05/bitcoin-mining-on-55 -year-old-ibm-1401.html My favorite quote from the second: >To summarize, to mine a block at current difficulty, the IBM 1401 would take about 5x10^14 years >(about 40,000 times the current age of the universe). The electricity would cost about 10^18 dollars. >And you'd get 25 bitcoins worth about $6000. This guy is sick! (Message edited by natexlh1000 on September 29, 2016) | ||
| Court |
Well… There is good news! After making arrangements with Amazon, who was wonderful to work with, to exchange the drive.... I contacted LaCie and explained the situation. The response from their high-powered technical support unit was "well… The drive SHOULD be working" I now know to things… The first … Always deal with Amazon The second… This is my last LaCie hard drive. I see why Greg's IT people feel the way they do. | ||
| Airbozo |
Punch cards: Lot's of fun. Hated getting called out at 2am to fix the machines and on more than one occasion, explain to the guy at 3am that it was HIS fault for dropping his deck and not my responsibility to order them again (I always suggested the pen marks down the side technique). Tools. We kept the best of those machines to produce "chaff" for parties at Amoco Production. Hell they already bought 3 years worth of cards. Fortran: I have a close friend that got called out of retirement to maintain several key pieces of software for IBM. He quoted them an outrageous amount thinking they would walk away. He now makes more per year than he ever imagined and works very little. Amazon: Court, I have always been impressed by their service. Had some parts show up mostly broken last year and they told me to keep them for spare parts instead of shipping them back. They sent me a new one too. LaCie: Mixed experience with them myself. TBH No more or less failures than any other rugged backups I have used. Stiction: Back in my SGI days, there were several batches of the Quantum HD's that would refuse to spin up after being powered down. When we rebooted, we had to modify several compiler systems to NOT power cycled the arrays. If they did power cycle, it took a couple of us an hour or so to "rap" the side of the drives with a screwdriver handle to get them spinning again. BTW: I refer to HDD's as "Spinning Rust". M.2 cards are going to replace SSD's in the very near future. Much faster transfer rates since they plug directly into the PCIe bus eliminating the drive controllers. Cool stuff that is now being implemented in data centers. Several companies are also using them to create backup and storage devices. Court: I have about as many HDD's including some from my old SGI VR systems and Reality Center storage units. For my personal stuff, I have gotten into the habit of making backups and sending them to one of my friends who does the same thing. In an emergency, my data is always backed up in at least 3 places. We even cross backup important stuff on each others sites in the cloud (encrypted of course). Seagate has been getting some bad press lately for several batches of bad drives. Not sure which ones LaCie uses, but this might be the issue. It goes back a couple of years too. Same issue WD had about 5 years ago. Just bad production. | ||
| Greg_e |
If you open the case, you'll find a Maxtor (older units) or probably Seagate in the newer units. Almost all of the failures I saw were at the bridge board (USB to SATA board) though we did have a few click of death cases. The click of death was solved by freezing the drive in a plastic bag, then copying the data before it got warm, and old IBM Deathstar drive trick. I liken LaCie support to Apple support, smarmy but at least Apple will do something about the problem. The ultimate in drives continues to be the Hitachi business class drives that cost 4x a normal drive, but they do tend to last in all my servers. My suggestion would be to buy drives and enclosures and assemble your own devices. That way you know exactly what parts are inside, and know that if the enclosure takes a dump, you can put the drive into a new one and still have the data. Samsung used to make really good drives, but they sold the spinning drive segment to either WD or Seagate. The latest drives I bought were WD Red NAS drives, only been in service a few weeks so I can't comment on their durability, but they are supposed to be designed for always on use. 6TB drives leave a lot to be lost, not sure how to streamline your workflow. But there must be a better way without a huge expensive cloud storage account. What do you back this stuff up onto? I'd be building a huge local NAS and hopefully one with a web connection so I could fetch and deliver smaller chunks on the road. That said it sounds like you need massive storage for this backup, not sure how big you can build a FreeNAS system, but it would be my choice of OS/software to do the job. Mostly because it is super easy to get operational and can use commodity hardware. You can also buy one from the opensource host called TrueNAS, sold through ixsystems. https://www.ixsystems.com/ If speed was not important, I would go for LTO tape, tapes are bigger than 1TB and faster than I would think to where they can saturate a USB connection (which is damn fast for analog tape). | ||
| Airbozo |
Greg, I have a half dozen of the WD Reds and they have been spinning with no issues for several years. You can buy the IXSystems FreeNAS boxes on Amazon too. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=lp_9199424011_nr_scat _13436301_ln?srs=9199424011&rh=n%3A13436301&ie=UTF 8&qid=1446132948&scn=13436301&h=3519a69e76e9c9c27e c7cfac204ebc7287f8e3f1 A few of their models use the cheap gigabyte mobo's and generic back planes, both are prone to failure. Best bet would be to build your own based on a quality mobo and back plane and load the OS yourself (it's free). They use the cheaper parts on that box because they make almost no profit on it and couldn't make any money at all on the ones with the Supermicro mobo and back planes (the original designer of those mini towers). BTW the CTO at IX Systems is a good friend and former neighbor. Great guy who has done a lot for the FreBSD community. | ||
| Reepicheep |
I actually tried that on your damaged Seagate Court. It didn't work, but I stashed the drive down in the basement. Now that it has sat for a few years, I should dig it out and try it again just for kicks. | ||
| Jaimec |
4 TB?? Damn, that's a LOT of porn, Court!!  | ||
| Pwnzor |
I have a 2TB NAS on my router at home, and it contains all my music, all our pictures, and every document I ever care to save... totaling about 300gb. I have it all backed up on an identical drive that stays unplugged. I don't think I'll ever need more space than that. | ||
| Blake |
Until you get the holographic video digicam. | ||
| Greg_e |
yes, Supermicro would be the best choice and doesn't need to be more than $250 to $350 for the mainboard. I built my Freenas system on a 1 rack unit Supermicro board and chassis, with 8 small 2.5 inch drives it came to around $1200. Has a little E3 Xeon in it and 16GB of ram, both of those were really fairly expensive a couple years ago when I built it (might have been more like 3 years) and were a major chunk of the money. Now it has eight 1TB Red NAS drives with a 4TB of space (that how much redundancy it has for failures). ZFS files system configured how it wanted them to be for best safety. There are some quirks, and these quirks shift with the different releases, but for a simple NAS system it should be easy. Trying to integrate with my Windows domain has some oddities (Freenas 9.1.1) and some pretty big issues for me with the latest stable (9.10.1) that I have yet to work out. My newest machine will be a single drive used for an assignment drop box, student FTP their finished assignments into the proper folder. If it's late you can tell by the time stamp, if not present then you can guess what the result should be. This box is going to be built on a Foxconn bare bones mini box, about $150 in parts (had an old drive for it). Just a simple NAS box that I can control a little more flexibly than the consumer NAS boxes like the Seagate (have one of those at home, works ok but a little slow on the transfers). | ||
| Zac4mac |
Someday, I'm gonna try to read all the different storage devices I have. I am buying a CNC mill that has a 1.4Mb floppy. Add to that some Jazz and Zip disks and a stack of HP magneto-optical cartridges and a pile of Mac, DOS/IDE and other hard drives... Maybe I'll find something interesting. Z |
