A Happy Ending to My Drive Crash

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I will concede that I am overly paranoid about backing up my digital photography and it has paid off. This week I’ve been dealing with a very unpleasant experience of having a drive fail on me. See The Best of Times, The Worst of Times The drive in question that failed is my working “production” drive where I store all my files from recent photo-shoots and my Lightroom libraries.

I was able to experience a happy ending to this stressful situation because my production drive was a mirrored (RAID 1) drive… meaning that the enclosure contained 2 drives that had the same data written to each. When my drive failed to load due to a mechanical failure of one drive it ceased to load on my computer. With the simple use of a screwdriver and an alternate enclosure I was able to extract the one working drive and bring it up on my computer as though nothing had happened. Never wanting to be with out a duplicate copy of any data I immediately duplicated my production drive to avoid the loss of any data in the future.

With that being said I’ve received a good amount of interest in my old and new drive setup. So here is the breakdown on what I was working with and what I will be working with moving forward.

The Old Setup

Production Drive: Maxtor oneTouch III 1.5 TB drive set up as a 750 GB RAID 1 mirrored drive.

Finals Drive: Maxtor OneTouch III 1TB drive set up as a 500 GB RAID 1 mirrored drive

Why did I originally go with these drives? They were purchased at a relatively low price and had Firewire 800 ports. Given the size of many of my Photoshop files it was important to have fast transfer rates. What I learned after purchasing these drives is that they had a high failure rate… hence my heightened interest in backups.

The New Setup

(1) FirmTek eSATA card – adds two eSATA ports to my Apple workstation.

(1) FirmTek SeriTek/5PM eSATA enclosure with (5) 1TB drives

Of the 5 drives in this 5-drive enclosure I have them configured as the following:

Bay 1: a single 1TB drive to be a scratch drive and temporary storage space.
Bay 2 & 3 – Production Drive: a software RAID 1 drive – total storage 1 TB
Bay 4 & 5 – Finals Drive: a software RAID 1 drive – total storage 1 TB

Why did I opt for this solution versus a Drobo or ReadyNAS?

I originally wanted a NAS drive that I could pursue a RAID 5 configuration on. In my evaluation I was reminded by David Sanger of the FirmTek enclosure and re-researched it. In the end what won me over is speed and flexibility.

eSATA enables transfer rates of up to 300 MB/second. This is faster than any other format at the moment and makes data transfer and access a breeze.
In addition to increasing storage capacity a goal of mine was to reduce the growing number of drives on my desk. The FirmTek enclosure enables hot-swappable drives. If one drive is full I can pull the drive put it in a drive library and replace it with another tray with a new drive. If I want to cycle backups to an off-site location I can pull a mirrored drive, relocate it and replace it with a new drive that can be rebuilt to restore the mirror.

Added bonus..
In the case of my external drive failure I was able to plug my salvaged drive from my failed old production drive into a bay of the FirmTek and transfer content to a new mirror with blazing speed…. well relatively blazing speed. It took me about 5 hours to transfer 500 GB.

Why did I ditch the idea of a NAS or RAID 5 setup?

Simply NAS drives are considerably slower and RAID 5 can be slow to rebuild. Seeing as how drive failures are inevitable I wanted to be sure that I suffer minimal downtime and can always be working. The dual RAID 1 drive setup enables me to do just that while having the peace of mind that a backup is always available.

Technorati Tags: hard drive, backup, strategy, FirmTek, RAID 1, RAID 5

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Posted by Jim on 01.22.2009 at 12:45 pm
Tagged: Hardware, Photography, Technology , Photography

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Georg

I'm a layman when it comes to RAID but there are stories about the second drive in a RAID-1 failing during a rebuild due to increased stress.
So please make sure you do have a proper backup of the RAIDed data and probably check to have the drives not come from the same batch.

Glad it worked out for you!

Handy Backup?

Hi,
This is Alex from Novosoft development,
I noticed here a suggestion that Blu-ray discs could be suitable for backups... and indeed, they are. If you are interested in a backup utility that supports Blu-ray, please check out the new feature in Handy Backup.
Thanks!

bean

Hi,
AMUG found the SeriTek/5PM provides a great solution for adding extra storage to the Mac Pro or the MacBook Pro. You can read the AMUG review here:

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/...

The SeriTek/5PM is the best 5-bay PM enclosure that I have seen. It is is the quietest 5-bay enclosure that AMUG has tested while also providing the best HD cooling. It's hard to find that combination. In addition, It can be used with the low cost SeriTek/2SE2-E card for performance up to 130MB/sec or a more expensive high performance card like the Sonnet Tempo E4P or the HighPoint RR2314 for performance up to 240MB/sec. per 5 bay enclosure.

Personally, I find the SeriTek/2SE2-E is all I need for photography but its nice to know that I can use this enclosure for HD video as well. In fact, with a 4-port card and four SeriTek/5PM enclosures I have seen performance as high as 700MB/sec with 16 HDs in RAID 0. Having the ability to scale the performance to meet my needs is a nice feature. I installed five Samsung 1TB HDs in my SeriTek/5PM and it runs great.

In comparison, the Drobo only runs a USB 2.0 speeds (30MB/sec) even with a FireWire 800 connection and some Drobo users have complained that they lost data with firmware updates. The SeriTek/5PM provides so many more configuration options and performance that is 5-10x faster than Drobo. The extra FirmTek speed really helps when I am making my backup disks for off-line storage.

Have fun!

Heath

I am in the market for such a device and was looking at Drobo. Why did you choose against the Drobo with the Firewire 800?

Jim Goldstein

@Mark The price is comparable to a fully stocked ReadyNAS NV+. I got a slight discount on it which helps. Ultimately with 1 TB drives in the $100 range its not that expensive when you configure it yourself. So far I really like it. The drives appear as your normal internal drives appear. The transfer rate is equivalent to internal drives. While the specs say 300MB/s I'm regularly seeing 200+MB/s in real world conditions. The speed is blazing and it makes file transfers, backups and speeds access to my Lightroom library a pleasure versus a burden. Now that things are up and running and I've used it for a week I would recommend it. I'll likely set up a second in the future if I need it.

Mark

The FirmTech seems like a nice box, although a bit pricey for not having any drives included. I will look forward to reading how it works out for you.

My internals on my MacPro are backed up to a ReadyNAS NV+ - so far I have been happy with it. I got it for the ability to share my iTunes library across my network. While it is nearly as fast as USB2, working with large files on it drove me to use it primarily as my backup device.

I also have a Samsung Spinpoint F1 in my MacPro based on its excellent reputation. I plan to add another to fill my 4th bay soon.

Jim

@Ron Paranoia about backing up is a necessity. Of course you don't want to burn more time than you need to in having the proper backups. I suppose that is what I meant.... I run right up to that line :) Good to hear about your experience with the ReadyNAS. I was super close to pulling the trigger on that, but opted for the FirmTek at the last minute.
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@G Dan Thanks for the comment. Perhaps I should have said "controlled paranoia" :)
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@BayTaperDotCom Excellent point. I didn't go into my offsite backup strategy, but the new enclosure easily supports this. To date offsite I've rotated out a 500 GB drive with my business critical imagery.
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@Gary Funny I won't go near WD drives and now I'm going to be avoiding Seagate. These companies cycle in quality so I need to change my over-generalized view of these companies. My friend Bryan recently recommended referencing the Mac Drive Upgrades/Compatibility Database on xlr8yourmac.com for the latest drive trends. I ended up getting (5) SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives. So far no complaints and they worked out of the box which isn't something I can say for Seagate.

Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Imag

Jim: Glad it's working out. A few words to live by:

SEAGATE
WESTERN DIGITAL

those are the only drives I'll ever consider buying. Period. Maxtor has the most common report history of failures. Also, smaller HD >Tb seem to perform better in the long run rather than partitioned drives <Tb. An extra step, well worth the peace of mind, go get a couple 500Gb external drives (see names above) and copy your stuff manually to them as a redundant archive.

In addition, when it comes to my master TIFF Files; I also burn two full sets of DVD copies; one stays in my office, the other lives at my mom's house as an offsite back-up.

Cheers,

Gary

BayTaperDotCom

One thing to keep in mind is that RAID should pretty much never be used as your true backup. Your true backup should be external and offsite. Two examples of why...

First, if the house burns down to the ground and your only copies and backups are in the house, game over, potentially a lifetime of work down the drain.

Just as importantly though, is a scenario like this... If you somehow say corrupt your LR library, or god forbid delete an important directory by accident (or say your children delete the directory), your RAID (depending on config) will happily replicate the now missing or corrupted data, and poof it's all gone (barring recovery tools, etc.).

You can probably think of other scenarios, but the point is, if you are serious about this, and if your livelihood depends on any of this, RAID is only one part of the equation -- offsite external snapshots are a must!

G Dan Mitchell

Jim:

First, congratulations (and giant sigh of relief!) for resolving the crash. Also, thanks for sharing information about your solution - what it is, why you chose it, and how it works.

Finally, you wrote: "I will concede that I am overly paranoid about backing up my digital photography..."

In my view, it is more or less impossible to be "overly paranoid" about file backup. Paranoia is perhaps warranted! :-)

Dan

Ron Niebrugge

"I am overly paranoid about backing up my digital photography"

Hi Jim,

I don't think you can every be "overly paranoid", I'm the same way myself.

I went with the ReadyNAS. It is a great device, and easy to use, but you are absolutely right, it isn't very fast.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and I'm glad to hear it had a happy ending!

Ron

John

Thanks Jim. Maybe I'll make myself a guinea pig and store the drive along with my old 35mm transparencies and see which lasts longer. I'll report my findings in 20 years. ;)
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Come to think of it, I wonder if in 20 years we'll still be able to scan a 35mm slide.

Jim

@John I'm not drive expert, but from what I know if the drive is kept in a moisture free location away from any form of magnet the drive should have a long lifespan. I personally never rely on one backup format. I have my source files on DVD as well, although I could do a better job of having my Photoshop files backed up. The biggest risk to long-term backup is changing formats. In two years there could be a new DVD format. Perhaps BlueRay DVD will provide greater storage capacity in which case it may be required to copy over all old DVD archives to the new format. Similarly new drive technology could come out requiring a transition. In the long run you never know how the technology will change. Its a sad state of affairs, but a reality every photographer needs to take into account.

John

Hey, Jim. I'm glad you had a happy ending. I'm just maxing out one of my externals and am looking at longer-term solutions. This post helps.

Maybe you can answer one other burning question. Can you simply retire/archive a hard drive with confidence that your data will remain intact on it? Or does it need to be powered up once in a while? Any thoughts?