When it rains, it pours

So the hard drive that has been iffy teh last few days finally crapped out yesterday, and I went and bought a new hard drive which works fine. Then I head over to my brothers to collect some engineering results with my 1TB external drive, and a friend of ours knocks it off the ........ing table and crashes the heads. 2 years of work POOF. Now its gonna cost $500-$1800 to maybe recover part of it.

The external drive WAS the backup BTW

You always need a backup for the backup! That sucks you lost your work though, life can be very lame sometimes.

Sorry to hear the bad news, abachler.

I hope things improve from this point for you.

Oh did I mention I have a $100,000 contract hinging on a proposal that's due Monday and my data and rough drafts where guess where ...

Looks like it will be a working weekend

Perhaps this will persuade you to go RAID?

In any case, sorry to hear that. Did you give your friend a good punch or two?

What sucks is that mechanical drives are still being used 50 years after they were invented. Sure SSDs are around, but they're still not quite there yet. Come on moving parts suck, that's why I'm paranoid about greasing bearings etc

Speaking of which, who knows perhaps I'll get a computer with an SSD submerged in mineral oil, good bye moving parts and head crashes!

As far as information density, you cant beat mechanical drives yet, I doubt you ever will. It's inherently more efficient to have the reading mechanism external to the storage medium. This allows the storage medium to be more densly packed. SSD's have a few advantages, such as impact resistance and assynchronous access (seek times), but they are cost prohibitive for serious data storage needs.

Yes, I am looking forward to going RAID 6 once I get the money, just replacing my old drive used up all my flex equity, so unless I get the contract it isn't likely to happen any time soon.

RAID 1 or 5 are a lot cheaper than RAID 6.
Maybe you could use one of those until you can afford RAID 6?

I'm surprised you're taking it so well.. I'd be CAPSLOCKING all over the place by now. I guess it's worth it to invest in fall-sensors, or SSDs (heh, wonder how hard a 1 TB SSD would hit the wallet...).

Originally Posted by cpjust

RAID 0 or 5 are a lot cheaper than RAID 6.
Maybe you could use one of those until you can afford RAID 6?

I'm not sure what level of RAID my MOBO supports natively, Ill have to check into that.

hmm... Over here, everything is expensive, but HDDs are kinda cheap, if you compare with other hardware.
Now a friend of mine has owned a 500GB HDD for years, was kinda cheap, and it has been dropped on the floor, crashed into stone walls and whatnot, so often, it's falling apart, and it making a loud annoying sound, still it works
but now that I think of it, it cost about $1000, but it was many years ago, and I think his rich parents, or even richer grandparents paid for it -.-
EDIT: Oh, and the reason I'm thinking $1000 as really much, is 'cause we were way younger then, like... Maybe at the phase were if you have $20 you're freaking rich xP or maybe just gotten past that...

Originally Posted by abachler

I'm not sure what level of RAID my MOBO supports natively, Ill have to check into that.

For simple RAID levels like 1 or even 5 it helps if your motherboard does the work, but it's usually supported by the OS also. Linux does software RAID and I believe Windows does it without additional software too.

I think Windows only supports software RAID for non-system disks (dynamic disks? or whatever they are called). I've been using Linux software RAID (level 0+1, whatever you call that ) for years on a P3 with no problems.