Hard Drive Died

[Pete]

Just taking a few minutes out of my evening to lament the loss of my laptop hard drive.

It was an SSD and, as such, I'd thought it would be more robust than normal hard drives. Still, after 3 months use it's gone to hard drive heaven and I've lost a month's work that I won't get back.

Fortunately I have two drives in my laptop and all of the design work goes on the other drive (a larger normal hard drive), but everything I've coded recently is gone Still, there's nothing too major lost here, despite my lack of regular backups - just one website template I'd started that can be re-done again from the Photoshop file and a lot of evenings' work on my gaming site that I was porting over to ProcessWire. The other bonus is that everything else I'd completed recently code-wise that did get uploaded to my web server can obviously been downloaded again so the only thing I've really lost is a lot of work on one site.

It was good that I had a backup even though it was a bit old so at least all I had to do was replace the drive, run a few windows updates and that was it  - no headache of an OS reinstall or anything.

So I'm being optimistic in that all the stuff I've learned using ProcessWire means I can do it all again but quicker, and I've also really learned my lesson with hard drives now - back up daily, especially when you've got the luxury of two drives - I could have easily had all my website work backed up to the other drive...

Oh well! 

[apeisa]

Sorry to hear about that Pete. I don't give you lessons about backups since same could happen to me for my personal projects and tests.

I think SSD drives are far from reliability of hard drives - although many people tell otherwise. "They have no moving parts so they don't broke" => "They are new technology, so they probably fail much more often". Still, they are much faster, so I  won't use other disks after my Vaio dies.

Related:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

[ryan]

Pete, sorry for your loss. My last hard drive crash was in the mid-1990s (an 80-megabyte Western Digital drive), and still haven't recovered from that one. The good news is that your data is most likely still there, somewhere on that drive. In fact, it's downright difficult to truly remove data from a drive unless you take a giant industrial electric magnet to it. Depending on what type of crash it was, you may still be able to retrieve it. There are lots of utilities out there that can recover stuff from flash media (usually SD cards), but maybe something like that could help (?). You could also try the freezer trick. Put the drive in the freezer overnight (in a freezer bag with a paper towel, to keep the moisture out) and try it again in the morning. If it mounts, then copy everything off of it as quickly as you can because it won't stay working much longer. I think this freezer trick is actually for normal hard drives, but apparently some have had success with flash media too (I could be wrong). Apparently the freezing process can temporarily reconnect some things at the molecular electronic level, temporarily. That's a guess anyway. Anything is worth a try.

[jbroussia]

Ouch !

I'm on SSD too, but only the OS is there, all my data is stored on another HDD, with "regular" backup (that is, when I think about it !) and the most important data is also sync'ed to my SugarSync account... but I realize now that my local web development work is not sync'ed... will add it to SugarSync !

[Pete]

Cheers guys.

Yeah ryan, I'll give the freezer trick a go as I'm reasonably sure that if it doesn't work and I return it to the manufacturer they'll not be able to tell that I've tried it.

The biggest issue is that I can't run any recovery tool until I find a machine that can actually see the drive. Thus far I've had no luck, but I've only been trying it on a few modern Windows 7 machines. I can't think that trying it on an older box with an older motherboard and XP would help but it's worth a shot as well.

If all else fails I'll just have to re-do the work I've lost, which I'm beginning to do today anyway. I'm definitely not doing anything though until I've got things backed up this time!

Thing is if you read the manufacturer's info about SSDs they're supposed to have somewhere between 1-2 million hours of use - that's their mean time before failure anyway (not sure how they come up with these figures as a million hours is a long time!). The thing to remember about MTBF though is that on average that's ho long they live, and it certainly doesn't mean they can't die inside 3 months like this one did.

Still, it's not done as badly as an enterprise-class DELL hard drive we had in a server that lasted less than a week, and that was an old-school hard drive, not a solid state. Fortunately the servers are in RAID so it wasn't a problem - just swapped it out for a new one - but it does make you wonder.

In fact, with the small number of drives I've seen fail at work in the last year (there are a lot of drives, so more are likely to fail) you'd think I'd have learned by now...

[ryan]

Google that freezer trick first just to see what other people say, because it's been quite awhile since I read about it originally. I tried it on an unmountable SD card, and it didn't work for me. But at least made me feel like I'd tried everything.

These MTBFs are in lieu of a manufacturing or materials defect I think. Also, my opinion is that most don't pack their drives for shipping very well (especially Amazon) and the shipping process isn't very friendly to delicate electronics.

I'm not very disciplined about backups, so eventually came to the conclusion that I needed something to do it for me since I would never keep track of it. As a result, I've got software running in the background that just keeps things backed up automatically (Time Machine, though I know similar software is available on Windows too). I think that's the only way to go, things are backing up to another drive and you don't have to think about it. For those times that I actually do think about backups, I make a bootable clone of my hard drive (every month or so) just so I've got a somewhat recent starting point.