Whilst struggling to catch up on life’s errands… doing battle with Fido’s insane, clueless bureaucracy… and post processing the thousands of pictures from my recent China and Orlando trips… my hard disk failed!
I moved swiftly to get a new disk and move the data, before the inevitable decay claimed yet more precious files. I learned a couples things about disks along the way:
- S.M.A.R.T. hard disks can do self-tests to catch these kinds of problems as they happen, without requiring that the disks be unused during the test. Most hard disks have S.M.A.R.T. capability. I had ignored the technology years ago, thinking that it required me to avoid use of the disk and was some kind of BIOS level integration – both untrue.
- Consumer hard disk choice isn’t just size and rotational speed (i.e. 5400 or 7200 RPM) anymore, ignoring branding. The major players now hawk “enterprise” class hard disks, which are subject to burn-in testing and are given a rated mean-time-before-failure of 1.2 million hours or more.
I used my narrowly avoided catastrophe as an excuse to spring for one of these premium disks, the 10 000 RPM Velociraptor from Western Digital.
One might think rotating 35% faster would only give a 35% increase in speed; third-party benchmarks and my personal observation suggest twice as fast. It’s particularly noticeable when I do bulk activities on many files, e.g. converting several hundred photographs into JPEG files; my CPU is now the bottleneck.
Surprisingly for an obvious performance component, it’s also supposed to be highly reliable. It’s rated at 1.4 million hours MBTF, and comes mounted in a giant heatsink to keep it cool (the drive itself is a 2.5″ form factor).
I’ve learned my lesson though, I’ve installed software to take advantage of the S.M.A.R.T. capabilities of hard disks, to email me as soon as a self-test fails. I’m also planning on one of Western Digital’s RE3 drives, rated for 1.2 million hours MBTF, reserving it for backup purposes only.
Overkill? Perhaps, but I do more with my computer nowadays than simply play games. If I were ever to truly lose all my data, I would be very inconvenienced and particularly upset at the loss of photographs. :/ Having reliable disks is one more important defense against that possibility.
