DriveSavers breathes life into a dead drive

**Iria** · May 12, 2008, 11:39 PM

It's well known that failed hard drives can be recovered, but few people actually use a recovery service because they're expensive and not always successful. Even fewer people ever get any insights into the process, as recovery companies are secretive about their methods and rarely reveal any more information that is necessary for billing. Geek.com has an article walking through a drive recovery handled by DriveSavers. The recovery team did not give away many secrets, but they did reveal a number of insights into the process.
_________
Source: Geek.com

Matth · May 13, 2008, 10:04 AM

The moral of that story (oh god, time I bought some) is that money invested into doubling up on your data is money well spent - $1500 for a recovery - sticking everything on two drives would have been cheaper.

The problem with most backup methods are the twin evils of time and media capacity though.

Anyone old enough to remember backing up using boxfulls of floppies, wave your zimmer frame... actually, I do remember doing one, actually a backup and transfer to new machine (no network) using PKZIP, and with a second machine formatting the floppies.

A 250MB tape, a later Ditto 3200, then DVD media. Even Blu-ray would need a lot of media swapping, and with write once 25GB media at about £8 (UK), the media costs more than another external disk drive - it is actually getting reasonable to consider extarnal drives as a backup medium - the only real drawback is that drives are somewhat fragile when compared to optical media - I wouldn't fancy relying on a box of external drives being transported often.

BlueMak · May 13, 2008, 02:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Matth

The moral of that story (oh god, time I bought some) is that money invested into doubling up on your data is money well spent - $1500 for a recovery - sticking everything on two drives would have been cheaper.

The problem with most backup methods are the twin evils of time and media capacity though.

Anyone old enough to remember backing up using boxfulls of floppies, wave your zimmer frame... actually, I do remember doing one, actually a backup and transfer to new machine (no network) using PKZIP, and with a second machine formatting the floppies.

A 250MB tape, a later Ditto 3200, then DVD media. Even Blu-ray would need a lot of media swapping, and with write once 25GB media at about £8 (UK), the media costs more than another external disk drive - it is actually getting reasonable to consider extarnal drives as a backup medium - the only real drawback is that drives are somewhat fragile when compared to optical media - I wouldn't fancy relying on a box of external drives being transported often.

My thoughts exactly.
BR discs are too expensive, and seeing how even DL DVDRs are relatively expensive even now, I doubt they will go down on price much.
As I see it now there is nothing that is both cheap and safe to use as a backup for hundrends of GB of data.

Tipstaff · May 14, 2008, 01:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Matth

Anyone old enough to remember backing up using boxfulls of floppies, wave your zimmer frame... actually, I do remember doing one, actually a backup and transfer to new machine (no network) using PKZIP, and with a second machine formatting the floppies.

A 250MB tape, a later Ditto 3200, then DVD media. ....

Good God. All of a sudden I feel really damn old.

Matth · May 14, 2008, 04:13 PM

What's the cheapest external RAID box, or would it work out cheaper building your own server?

H'mm, If Nvidia RAID can be used with a Linux based server (don't wanna pay more Bill Gates tax), the a £32 motherboard (Inno3D SL7N73VM), an E1200 CPU, a bit of RAM and some SATA drives, could be the beginning of a nice little server. wonder if any Mini-ITX have RAID support - yes, the EPIA SN supports SATA RAID, now that could be a starter for a very nice micro-server.

Judas · May 14, 2008, 04:52 PM

alot of motherboards have a single raid 1 supported internal/exterenal esata system.

getting a internal 500gb sata and a external esata drive and then raid 1 them, and volla .. you've got a rather excellent solution

BlueMak · May 14, 2008, 06:10 PM

Anyone knows what drives Iomega uses?

Tipstaff · May 16, 2008, 01:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BlueMak

Anyone knows what drives Iomega uses?

Last time I cracked open one of their boxes I was greeted by an Hitachi, however I don't know if that's still the case.

BlueMak · May 16, 2008, 10:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tipstaff

Last time I cracked open one of their boxes I was greeted by an Hitachi, however I don't know if that's still the case.

I am very satisfied with Iomega products, an 80gb external drive I bought in 2001 still works (though I have loaned it to a friend now) but their warranty is still at 1 year.

Hitachi are not bad.