Mini-Hard Drive Farm

As you may know I'm a bit of a digital pack rat.  What this means is that I keep a lot of backups.  And often backups of backups.  In fact, I have some backups going as far back as 1997 of stuff like archived email, pictures, and other assorted digital nicknacks.  Every so often though I'll go through and start chucking the disks in the trash as I really can't find a reason to keep a version of Netscape Navigator 2 around any longer.  Despite these occasional "cleaning" efforts I still have a rather large collection of optical disks (both CD and DVD) that have a bunch of stuff on them.

In the past I've relied on optical disk storage, first CDs then DVDs, as the price per backed up megabyte was fairly cost effective.  The past couple of years though have seen a dramatic decrease in the price per megabyte of hard disk storage drop like the proverbial stone.  As a result I've been picking up a few external drives for storage duties as well as looking at offsite, online backup solutions.

As a general rule I like to have at least one backup copy of stuff here with me on either an optical disk or, preferably, an external hard drive (multiple hard drives in some cases) as well as at least one copy of "important" stuff off site.  I've been burned too many times by loosing stuff to a primary computer hard drive failure.

At the moment my current "hard drive farm" consists of:

• 500GB Western Digital My Book (circa 2007) formatted to NTSF for Windows related duties
• 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA hard drive in an external USB 2.0 enclosure formatted to Mac OS Journaled
• 1.5 TB Samsung Story external USB 2.0 hard drive formatted to Mac OS Journaled
• 2 TB Western Digital Elements external USB 2.0 hard drive formatted to Mac OS Journaled

I'm getting ready to add another 500GB external drive by taking the old hard drive I pulled from my old desktop and putting it into an external enclosure and that will be formatted to NTFS for Windows uses as well.

My all new digital plan is to use the 1TB external as a DVD ISO storage unit.  I rip all my DVDs to ISO images so that I can mount them virtually whenever I want to watch a DVD.  This way I do not have to worry about swapping disks all the time as well as making it easy to "rip" them for watching on either my HTC Evo or iPad.  The newest drive, the 2TB Western Digital drive is being used as a Time Machine backup for my iMac with backups set for every couple of days.  The 1.5TB Samsung is a general use storage device for day to day use.  The current 500GB Western Digital and the future 500GB external, which are formatted for Windows, are used to house files for Windows 7 so that I do not have to use up too much primary hard disk space on my iMac for Boot Camp.  The main limitation on those two is that I cannot write to them from within the Mac OS unless I fire up VM Ware Fusion.

For offline storage I use a combination of services.  For the iMac's hard drive I use Carbonite.  For less than $60 per month I'm able to back up my entire internal hard drive off site.  For pictures I use Carbonite (they are on the primary hard drive after all) and I also upload post edited pictures to Flickr.  For less than $25 per year I have unlimited uploads and it's a nice way to both share my pictures AND have secured backups of them.

I cannot stress enough to friends and family how important a proper backup strategy is to protecting your valuable digital content in this digital age!

Western Digital FAIL!

Last week I finally got my third replacement drive from Western Digital and today I finally got around to opening up the box it came in and found something that just burned up the last little shred of good will that WD may have had with me.

They shipped me a refurbished hard drive!

If it's not bad enough that the first drive failed in less than three months and I had to pay to ship the defective drive back to Western Digital.  Then I had the replacement drive fail in less than four months and AGAIN had to pay to ship that defective drive back to them.  Now I get my third drive and they ship me one that failed on someone else!  This is very much a WTF moment!

There are some things I do not mind buying refurbished, but I buy it knowing it's been refurbished.  In this case I paid for a NEW hard drive.  Not a retread from someone else!  I NEVER buy refurbed hard drives for a very good reason.  I use hard drives to store data, pictures, videos, music, and what not.  This means I want something that is reliable, hence not purchasing refurbished hard drives.  And frankly, based on my experiences with Western Digital drives recently getting a refurbed drive is not instilling a whole lot of confidence in me right now.

I've ordered an external hard drive enclosure that is due to arrive this week and my plan was to install this replacement drive into that as I'm tired of having to open up my computer case to yank out defective drives.  At this point I do not even know if I'll bother with this one.  I may call Western Digital tomorrow and let them know just how unhappy I am with them at the moment.  I'm already planning to research Lemon Laws here in North Carolina to see if I can seek any sort of relief on that front.

What really frustrates me about this whole deal is that up until last year when I started having problems with this model drive I was a fan and frequent buyer of Western Digital products.  At this point I cannot imagine buying from them ever again.

Western Digital Travails

I just finished up filling out the information at the Western Digital support website to RMA an internal hard drive back to them.  This will make the second time in twelve months that I've had to do this for this particular model of hard drive (WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA).  The first one that I purchased almost one year ago died about four months after getting it and managed to take A LOT of stuff with it into the great electronic beyond. 

After getting the replacement drive back in July I held off transferring anything important to the drive but after two months of no issues I went ahead and starting using it for its intended purpose, media storage.  Fast forward to October and guess what happened?  That's right, it started going hinky on me.  AGAIN!  This time I invested in some recovery software and was able to salvage close to seventy percent of what was on the drive before it gave up the ghost.

At least this time the symptoms are slightly different.  This time the drive randomly "vanishes" from the system and occasionally puts out a high pitched whine.  What makes the whole experience the more frustrating is that the SMART system shows the drive as healthy (when it shows up at all) and I've run numerous tests that detect no bad sectors.

Western Digital has dropped the ball twice on this one.  What makes the whole situation all the more insulting is their attempts to "up-sell" me to a different model hard drive for the same price for that model new, or in a couple of cases more expensive than just buying it from a retailer.  Where's the incentive in that?!?  Why would I choose to "upgrade" my "experience" by paying full price for a "replacement" drive that does nothing more than cancel the five year warranty on my current crapped out drive and put more money in their pockets?  The really sad part is that I can imagine some people buying into this scheme!

No, instead I get to pay for shipping AGAIN on yet another defective drive.  I paid $109 for the drive last year and have now spent another $20 on top of that shipping defective drives back to Western Digital.  Insane!!!

What I'll probably do in this case is ship the drive out this week, wait two or more weeks for the replacement drive, and then either sell the drive on Craigslist or find someone I don't really care for and give them a "present" of a brand new hard drive.  There is NO WAY I'd trust another Western Digital hard drive.  EVER!