[AT] OT: Computer crash and data loss

[Spencer Yost]

Don't forget that most drive manufactured in the last 10 years have on-board monitoring capabilities, and these metrics are reported through the SMART framework.  I have been able to avoid most catastrophic failures just by keeping an eye on these and replacing drives proactively.

There are several great utilities to report these metrics for you.  I care enough on my unix severs to keep an eye on disk health, but the ability to monitor SMART data is built in.    On windows machines I just backup and don't worry.  So I don't use any utilities enough in Windows to recommend one.  Probably cannot go wrong with HDtune or diskcheckup though.

Here is one of the better papers on the subject.   It is widely referenced and that always makes me suspicious, but in this case it is well deserved:


http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf



Spencer

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 3, 2014, at 1:31, Chuck Bealke <bealke at airmail.net> wrote:
> 
> Dean,
> 
> The freezer trick worked for me a few years ago.
> I had an external drive ready to use to copy from the ailing C drive and
> did save a bunch of files when the drive gave its final performance as I 
> plugged
> it frozen into the system the next morning.  You can find YouTube and other
> info about it with a simple search.
> What you forget is how long it takes to copy a big volume of files if you
> have not done it in a while - and how you end up wanting to save most
> everything, even when you can't remember using some of it in a while
> (or in some cases what it is.)  Darn, sounds like my closets and garage.
> Good Luck!
> 
> Chuck Bealke
> Plano, TX
> 
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