Terrapin Tables

i have 2 maxtor 300 GB drives, currently carrying 2/3 of my dissertation data. they've worked fine so far, but this puts the fear of death in me.

Here at work, we recently had two Maxtor hard drives fail in a RAID array - they were both from the same bad batch, so it's not a general damnation of Maxtor, but it's still not good. I recently had the Hitachi drive from my laptop crash, too. And, just recently, my boss's hard drive crashed, but I can't remember what brand it was. But all of those crashes in so short a period really drove home to me how unreliable hard drives are, and how important backups are.

Roy, if I were you, if that data is critical, I'd find some way to back it up. If you're really using most of that 300 GB from each drive, a tape backup might be a good option. Or, you might want to just install extra hard drives and copy all of your data to them, or maybe even an external hard drive. Here at work, I have automatic backups setup to copy everybody's data to the server, and then backup all of that, including the server data, to an external hard drive, that I swap out every week to keep a copy off site. But we're only using around 75 GB, so an external hard drive works fine for us. If your data's small enough, maybe just backing up to a DVD would work.

BTW, when my laptop hard drive crashed, I hadn't backed up the data. I sent it off to a data recovery place, and because it was an actual physical failure of the drive, it cost 1500 to get the data recovered. Luckily, they were able to do it, but prevention is definitely better than the cure.

Western Digital Rules!
that is all.