Hard Drive Enclosures

I used to have my own Apple Mac business installing and supporting networks in schools and business as well as to the private individual.
I also supported a great many schools' Windows networks and was also an ICT consultant/teacher so my experience of the need to backup and getting folks to do it was pretty wide.
I would always recommend that there was a hard drive(s) dedicated to just backing up at the end each day or even down to every 15 minutes for some clients.
And practically all of the companies/institutions would ask me to install them... but the private individuals would usually want to save the money....

As far as personal use was concerned, I would back up each day BUT I was hoisted by my own petard last year.....

My 5 year old media hard drive (which was too full) had been hammered quite hard during the lockdowns and I had not bothered to back it up for a long time (I blamed it on Flu for nurturing bad habits!).
The drive had hundreds and hundreds of movies, many TV series, tens of thousands of music tracks, all gleaned and backed up from streaming or from my DVDs, Blurays, CD's and even old vinyl.
Of course, Murphy's Law stepped in and it developed a fault and it gradually began to die....... It would not be recognised by any of the computers in the house and even the best disk repair utilities could only resurrect some of the data.

I have learned the lesson that I used to religiously tell others..... always back up, even when you are lazy and also perhaps have a back-up of the back up if the data is extremely important!
I now only use SSD drives (and yes they do not last forever either so take care)..
Backing up and even just loading/saving is swift and soundless ...as well as saving a whole lot of energy!..... but laying out the cash for the back-up SSD drives was painful ......
 
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There are utilities that are free that will give you the health of the hard drive, they do multiple reads and will give you a "rating" on each sector (you know the operating system retries reads and does not report that it had to retry)

Get the free version of this: DiskGenius: Data Recovery, Partition Manager, Backup & Disk Utilities

Then just run the disk utility... you will see the disk "aging" and it will also try to recover something unreadable. I will read the entire disk.

On mechanical drives that are important, I do this every 6 months, and replace if any sector is worse than the 2 top "best" ratings (I think it is a 1 to 5 scale)...

You can indeed predict failure... Also do you do a chkdsk c: /f of the drive on a regular basis? That will point up issues with your FAT/MFT table.

There are indeed tools to warn you.

SSD's are another case, when they crap out, they are gone in most cases.

Greg
 
The hard disk brand name is also to be considered.
For a period of times I bought several Maxtor drives, first in technical, first in prices.
I got a lot of issues and several Maxtor hard drives were finally used to raise some furnitures !!
Maxtor was finally taken over by Seagate.
Now I buy only Western Digital only, and I am very happy with them.

It is quite impossible as far as I know, to get reliability rating about the various brands.
My usual IT newspaper reports regularly about new hard drives performances, but will they last long ?
 
It is quite impossible as far as I know, to get reliability rating about the various brands.
My usual IT newspaper reports regularly about new hard drives performances, but will they last long ?

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Paul
 
Thank you very much Paul. I am very surprised.
On the web page there is also this graph !!

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HGST is Hitachi and my home tower PC included an Hitachi HD and I was quite happy with it as it lasted 10 years, logging 50 000 hours.
It is now replaced by a WD. The hereabove curve shows Hitachi is the leader on the reliability.
 
Thank you very much Paul. I am very surprised.
On the web page there is also this graph !!

View attachment 295995

HGST is Hitachi and my home tower PC included an Hitachi HD and I was quite happy with it as it lasted 10 years, logging 50 000 hours.
It is now replaced by a WD. The hereabove curve shows Hitachi is the leader on the reliability.
These days there is no HGST (Hitachi) as the 2.5" production went to Western Digital and the 3.5" went to Toshiba. Those two and Seagate are the only real players in the game now.

Paul
 
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