What are the odds?

[Kadarin]

I have two external (firewire) HDDs that both decided to fail tonight. Unless I can recover the data, that's approximately 1.2TB of porn that just bit the dust. I'm hoping for the best, but...

:momentofsilence:

 

[dguy6789]

Did you have them behind some kind of UPS? Did you buy them both at the same time? If they both failed then it is more likely that they were both getting low quality power or that they both came from the same batch of defective drives from the manufacturer.

 

[theflyingpig]

Just go to one of the many youtube style porn sites and download the flv files. Thats how I restored most of my collection. In fact, I even managed to find some of my old favorites from '97 - '98. It was wonderful. Everyone knows this.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

It's 2009, you should be streaming your porn anyway.

 

[Nocturnal]

It happens, it's possible that if they were both connected to the same power source, a brown out, black out, power surge, or any type of power fluctuation may have killed it. It's not that uncommon.

 

[0roo0roo]

firewire controller probably died..might be ok if u crack em out

 

[sao123]

try in a different system... maybe the fw interface on your mobo died.

 

[xSauronx]

the novel groupwise at school died a few days after a recent power surge. 3 hard drives went down in the span of about 2 hours

 

[chin311]

Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer
It's 2009, you should be streaming your porn anyway.

lol this.

pornhub
spankwire
mofosex

i mean come on its 2009

 

[nageov3t]

don't put "important" data on external drives without a backup located elsewhere?

I've had scores more issues with external drives than I ever have with internal. all I'll use 'em for anymore is as trash drives just to move large amounts of data from one computer to another (like every couple months, I'll copy my WoW folder from my desktop and overwrite it onto the laptop that I occasionally game on)

 

[ViviTheMage]

haha loki, you are saying that you backup your porn onto an external HDD and then back it up to an offsite area too?

 

[nageov3t]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
haha loki, you are saying that you backup your porn onto an external HDD and then back it up to an offsite area too?

I don't really consider my porn to be "important" but my "media" drive (pretty much any large file I download... porn, movies, mp3's, etc) is on an internal RAID1. although some of it is spread across to my other machines just from moving stuff around for road trips and whatnot.

 

[Engineer]

The odds: 42

(obvious answer).

 

[Chunkee]

It is God, telling you to right your ways....

 

[TheKub]

The drives may be fine. I would crack the cases and remove the drives and either connect them inside the PC or buy\borrow another enclosure to test.

 

[Kadarin]

Originally posted by: TheKub
The drives may be fine. I would crack the cases and remove the drives and either connect them inside the PC or buy\borrow another enclosure to test.

Yeah, it might be the interface. These drives are connected to a logic board that allows for FW400/800 or USB, and none of these are working on three separate PCs. The next step is to crack the cases open and see what's inside. However, the drives are probably dead; both produce clicking sounds when you turn them on.

And yeah, it's just porn, so not worth the expense of backing it all up offsite.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
firewire controller probably died..might be ok if u crack em out

This. I recently had a 2TB external drive go out. Its USB connection bit the dust, but the drives and data were just fine when I took them out and hooked 'em up with eSATA.

 

[Crono]

It was me. I lightning struck your house.

 

[randay]

If they are the same model and bought at the same time and used the same amount, in the same computer, then the odds are very good that they will fail at the same time. and in the same way.

 

[TheKub]

Originally posted by: Kadarin
However, the drives are probably dead; both produce clicking sounds when you turn them on.

Have a little faith bad power supplies\adapters or messed up interface controllers could cause improper startup and make the drive click.

 

[Kadarin]

Update on this... Both drives are dead. I pulled them both out of their cases and plugged them in directly, using different power, and they're definitely dead. Both are Seagate "Barracuda 7200.10" 750GB, p/n 9BJ148-326 date code 07143 firmware 3.AAD. I will never buy Seagate drives again.

 

[theprodigalrebel]

FWIW, I once read an article on computerbase.de on hard drive failure rates. They used data from a major European e-tailer on number of RMAs created. Turned out about 3% of all hard drives shipped failed within an year - didn't matter whether it was Seagate, Samsung or Western Digital.

Old article was old, can't find link. I think it was 2 years ago. I'm pretty sure situation hasn't changed much since (well, except that Seagate 7200.1 1.5TB fiasco).

 

[Reel]

What are the odds of one drive failing? Are they both the same odds of failure? Are the two failures independent or dependent events? You have failed to provide enough information for us to provide you with the odds.

 

[novasatori]

Originally posted by: Crono
It was me. I lightning struck your house.

Crono?

 

[sao123]

Originally posted by: Kadarin
Update on this... Both drives are dead. I pulled them both out of their cases and plugged them in directly, using different power, and they're definitely dead. Both are Seagate "Barracuda 7200.10" 750GB, p/n 9BJ148-326 date code 07143 firmware 3.AAD. I will never buy Seagate drives again.

its probably your fault, since seagate issued a firmware update for all its 7200.1x drives, as they were experiencing volumes of predictable deaths...

you probably failed to perform the required update.

the good news is some drives were able to be revived by doing the firmware update post mortem.