My oh my....

[Muckelroy]

I just snagged a Western Digital 2 Terabyte external hard drive at Target for $69 bucks

I couldn't pass it up....

I paid at least $130 or so for a 2 TB hard drive and enclosure about 6 months ago or so..... It's absolutely ridiculous how cheap digital storage is becoming.

Let's see -- that's about 3.3 cents per gigabyte.

Just another reason (very sad, but inevitable) why analog is becoming less and less economical. But nonetheless, glad to have massive storage so cheaply and easily!! I think I'll give it to someone for Christmas.

 

[fstrat76]

I picked up the same drive. But This will be the last time I pick up this junk. I had to get another drive quickly because a 500 gb drive just failed on me and i have to reload all samples.

I never store anything critical on these new drives anymore because they are made so cheaply, priced accordingly, and with high failure rates among all cheap drive manufacturers that anything critical requires me to purchase higher end drives. I've had some success with lacie and am going to look at otwc and using raid.

My opinion of course, but i just had three drives fail in the last year and a half.

If you put your projects on these drives, make sure to have a backup. Oh, and make sure those backup drives are reliable also otherwise you'll need a backup of your backup.

People think they are economical but they are becoming throw aways. I'm waiting to see reliability on ssd.

 

[miroslav]

I've had some success with lacie...

Yeah...prices are real cheap on some drives...but I wouldn't hesitate to spend a few more bucks for something I know is better and more reliable.

I'm going to be getting a 1TB LaCie Quadra, which has USB 3, SATA and Firewire 400 & 800 connection options.
At $122 it's more than what you will pay for some drives at Wall-Mart or Target...but I think it's a better drive. There is also a 2TB USB-only LaCie for like $89...which is terrific...but I want the Firewire capability.

I already have a smaller 160GB LaCie USB 2...it's been working great for a few years now, never any issues. I use it as my portable backup drive for all my audio files. It's very small, so basically I can put it in my laptop bag and take it with me...that way I have a full backup that is away/outside of the studio rather than have all my backups stored in the same place...but I keep another two backups at the studio, both to HD and DVD.

We spend a lot of time and effort working on our music...I don't want to have to recreate all of it from scratch because of some oversight or glitch.

 

[sweetbeats]

I use bensbargains.net to find the deals. I pretty much wait for deals to come up at newegg...I've had frustrating results with some others. Newegg has been great. And for drives I only use Seagate or Western Digital. Hitachi is another winner if it is a 2.5" drive, but Seagate and Western Digital still make good drives and have the warranty to back it up...a little more $$$, but a whole lot less headache.

 

[jpmorris]

With disk drives, it's a good idea to store anything important on at least two of them. I have my data disk mirrored in a two-disk RAID array - a three disk mirror would be better still, since with two you have the problem of 'which one is the damaged one?' if data corruption happens, but I don't have enough power connectors for that sadly.

I have two external disks for backup, one at home and one at the office. I update these and swap them over every month. I have also started burning super-important things to DVD or Blu-ray just in case there is some latent corruption. I'd like to use something like ZFS or BTRFS which has built-in checksumming, but neither of those seem to be production-ready at the moment.

I must at some point restart my project of backing up the multitrack tapes to disk...

 

[dodgeaspen]

I had bought a 500 GB a few years ago and almost filled it with nothing but bootleg music. Then one day I got to listen to a Janis Joplin CD and the thing was dead. I called the manufacture and he explained that depending what was wrong they could charge me up to 2K for retrieval. HMMMM! Luckily it was just a power supply. My father in law replaced the PS, bought me a new one, and transferred all my tunes to the new drive. What a pain, atleast if it was a tape I could have re spliced it for a few pennies.

 

[evm1024]

WD and others have at least 2 versions of their drives in a specific capacity. The 2TB drives come in a run of the mill form and in an enterprise form (green and black in the case of WD). One of the key features is that the enterprise drives come with a 5 year warranty and the others 3 year.


All drives that have important data should be in a mirror array if possible and if not then the data should be mirrored (rsync, ghost, etc).

I run some HPC clusters in the day and have about 700 disks in our farm (around 200TB of data) mostly in RAID5. In a bad week I see 4 or 5 disk failures and after a power failure I might see 8 to 10. But then again I run drives till they fail or at least to the limit of the warranty. In a good moon I might go 3 months without a failure at all.

I only buy drives with 5 year warranties thinking that the drive maker is on the hook and thus puts a little more effort into QC before selling the drive. None the less all drives fail - some sooner than others. Back up that data.

--Ethan

 

[sweetbeats]

All great points here.

My DAW system is older. I've been creative in order to maintain decent data stream performance. The system drive is standalone on IDE, the tracking drive is a spanned array on two 2.5" drives in the FDD bay. Then I use a mirrored array for backups. I risk a loss during tracking, but the internal bussing throughput is decent enough that I run incremental backups in between takes or songs and it works fine. This is on a 32-bit P4 SFF system with 2GB of RAM. Like my taste in vintage analog gear, I seem to prefer a non-cutting-edge system for the DAW.

My point is that good drives become important when managing data this way.

 

[Muckelroy]

Right on...

I don't record nearly as much as I used to. But I am no stranger to data loss. 90% of my focus is on backing up photos and videos. I already have my own 2 tb backup drive that runs constantly, plus a 160gb Lacie drive that is built like a tank which I keep monthly backups on, and stored in my fire box in the event of the unthinkable.

This drive is going to someone who does not have any backup strategy in place whatsoever, except that this person keeps their digital photos stored on the SD card of the camera, and keeps buying new SD cards each time they get full

The hope is that both the primary drive and this external drive won't crap out at exactly the same time of course, that would be painful.

 

[fstrat76]

If I'm looking for an internal, and there's a sale is for an external, I'll buy the external and gut the enclosure and use just the drive as an internal. Seems like the internal drives have lasted longer for me.

However, as with many many things these days, these cheaper drives just aren't lasting as long as they use to.

Has anyone tried a SAN for audio yet? I'm wondering if this might be an option too, but not sure it can handle the speed necessary for audio processing.

I may be looking at tape backups for business so I might as well include the audio projects as well, but tape backup is still pretty expensive.

I think the trick today is to have raid and several good backups (and a plan) with offsite storage also.

 

[Beck]

Yeah, that's a great deal for sure... right up until the moment it crashes and you lose all the data. At that point the tape starts looking very economical again. Tape prices suck… way too damn high. But when you think how long it lasts… just looking at the pile of dead hard drives in my garage, tape isn’t so costly over the long term.

No really, it's nice to have all that digital capacity as another source of backup. But I have 30-year-old analog master tapes that haven't "crashed" yet. And even those brands that are susceptible to sticky shed I've baked and transferred without incident.

The storage options are indeed wonderful. Gotta hold on to my analog masters though... I have a tape closet full.

At the moment I'm walking the wire without a safety net. I used to have a Win 2k server in the house with RAID to back everything up, but I got tired of maintaining it. Now I back things up to an external drive, but not really. I mean it's there but I've gotten lazy. It will no doubt take a major crash for me to get unlazy again.

Of course when I'm working on a project for someone else I back things up with overkill, but my own I get a little complacent at times. Yup... I'm a typical IT guy... do as a say not as I do.