Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

[Arelem]

I'm assuming you're using drive and partition interchangeably in which case, read LMiller7's post about using folders instead of partitions.

Since the partitions are seen as drives D, G and H by the computer, that's how I refer to them. I also saw the post about folders. I'd rather not dig through a folder tree to get to what I want. If I want a DWG file I created, I click G:, then DWGs.

One additional folder in string is that big a deal? If so, just make a shortcut for your final destination.

I don't like cluttering my desktop up with shortcuts.

 

[LMiller7]

I don't like cluttering my desktop up with shortcuts.

I don't like cluttering up my hard drive with partitions.

Folders are a far more flexible organizational technique than partitions.

With partitions you must decide up front how many you will have, where they will be placed, and what sizes they will be. Later changes to partitions are problematic, may require third party tools, and are very restricted in scope. Movement of data between partitions is very time consuming for large files.

Folders can be added, moved, and deleted at any time as circumstances change. Files or folders can be quickly moved anywhere within a volume. The data itself doesn't move, only a few pointers in the folders that contain them. NTFS adds some other things I won't go into at this time.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I don't like cluttering my desktop up with shortcuts.

I don't like cluttering up my hard drive with partitions.

Folders are a far more flexible organizational technique than partitions.

With partitions you must decide up front how many you will have, where they will be placed, and what sizes they will be. Later changes to partitions are problematic, may require third party tools, and are very restricted in scope. Movement of data between partitions is very time consuming for large files.

Folders can be added, moved, and deleted at any time as circumstances change. Files or folders can be quickly moved anywhere within a volume. The data itself doesn't move, only a few pointers in the folders that contain them. NTFS adds some other things I won't go into at this time.

At the risk of sounding repetitious, .

 

[ICIT2LOL]

I just said big drives big crash and therefore big data loss if that is not logical well perhaps I should give this all away...

Sigh! You are completely missing the point.

...That tells me straight away that you have your opinion and woe betide the person who even goes close to disagreeing with you...

Classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Whatever:sarc:

 

[Arelem]

I don't like cluttering my desktop up with shortcuts.

I don't like cluttering up my hard drive with partitions.

Folders are a far more flexible organizational technique than partitions.

With partitions you must decide up front how many you will have, where they will be placed, and what sizes they will be. Later changes to partitions are problematic, may require third party tools, and are very restricted in scope. Movement of data between partitions is very time consuming for large files.

Folders can be added, moved, and deleted at any time as circumstances change. Files or folders can be quickly moved anywhere within a volume. The data itself doesn't move, only a few pointers in the folders that contain them. NTFS adds some other things I won't go into at this time.

At the risk of sounding repetitious, .

The 2 of you are right ol' grouches aren't you?

All I did was express what worked for me, I didn't belittle or criticize others choices or opinions. But me? You just keep coming back with a "you are so stupid to do it that way" attitude because it doesn't conform to YOUR opinion.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but I thought these forums were for folks to express their experience and opinions to help others. The 2 of you appear to be attempting to shut down any of that which does not agree with what you feel is the proper opinion or experience.

To quote another poster "...That tells me straight away that you have your opinion and woe betide the person who even goes close to disagreeing with you..."

 

[Brink]

   Warning

Let's keep this discussion friendly shall we. :sarc:

 

[LMiller7]

I never said or meant to imply that anyone was stupid. If using multiple partitions works for you, great. I myself use 2 partitions, one for the OS and applications and one for my own files. I have been doing this for many years and it works well for me. But this isn't something I would recommend to others for general use. I have seen many cases where multiple partitions are created but the user accepts defaults for everything and the C drive becomes full while D is almost empty.

Also be aware that this is a public forum where all posts will be accessible for years to come by anyone with an Internet connection. Most doing so will not be members of this forum. I wanted to be sure that all readers understood that the use of partitions was not the normal organizational method but one that has some serious problems. The use of folders is usually preferred. This had nor been previously mentioned in this thread and I thought an important point. I did say that there were legitimate exceptions.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Careful Planning

I wanted to be sure that all readers understood that the use of partitions was not the normal organizational method but one that has some serious problems. The use of folders is usually preferred.

Perhaps it would be better to say, "creating partitions requires careful planning."

I have multiple Windows partitions spread over three HDDs (C to K) .
On top of that there are 4 other drives; 2x DVD, a virtual optical, and a RAMDisk (L to O).

I also have 3 more Linux partitions mixed amongst them.

I spent 4 or 5 hours working out different partition combinations, before I installed my new HDD and then I restored my backup HDD images.

I actually regret not including a Programs partition (which I normally do) when I did a complete reinstall in September 2012.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

All I said was my own personal preference and no more and because I have had nothing but trouble with large drives it got blown out of all proportion in my mind.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there

I've given up using Discrete volumes such as "D","E","F" etc apart from "C" which is an SSD and where I have my OS installed.

I'm simply using pools of volumes as "Storage Spaces" so I don't care where the data physically resides. HDD's are plenty reliable these days - and if you've got backup then it's no problem either to recover / re-create your data.

The advantage with "Storage spaces" also is that you can have very large libraries / data spaces for data bases - for example you can have say a library of several TB of music files / video files even if you only have several discrete 500 GB and 320 GB HDD's.

With Storage spaces you can dynamically ADD more volumes if you want to.

The Storage spaces I think is a Windows 8 / 8.1 feature - but you can use Libraries in W7 to achieve the same result - I think the Storage spaces though is far better implemented and it really is seamless - Windows explorer just treats the storage space as one big HDD.

(You can have several storage spaces if you want too).

Cheers
jimbo

 

[lehnerus2000]

With Storage spaces you can dynamically ADD more volumes if you want to.

How do you image an "aggregate" partition?

 

[Lebon14]

Again, Backblaze proves that Hitachi drives are really good! I'm glad that I chose a 4TB Hitachi hard drive for my music collection.

And I'm also a suscriber to Backblaze for my backups.

 

[jimbo45]

With Storage spaces you can dynamically ADD more volumes if you want to.

How do you image an "aggregate" partition?

Hi there

You back it up in "Data Mode" - you can either back up as an "Entire Logical Volume" or do it in Data mode. In "Volume mode" Windows treats it as an entire Disc --you won't be able to back it up as an "Image" though when using programs like FREE MACRIUM in stand alone (boot) mode. Your Backup program will need to be able to handle this in DATA mode.

The disadvantage is that currently you won't be able to do a "bare metal" recovery of the data space - that's not normally an issue since you can recover the OS via the "classical Imaging method" if you need to do a bare metal recovery and then from Windows run your backup software to recover the data.

IMO since the "Aggregate partition" is DATA and not OS + pgms there is no point in "Imaging" an entire data space as a disk -- things like Music libraries don't change much so once they are backed up you only really need to do "Incrementals" or "Differentials" on this type of data.

That's largely the problem with the FREE backup products --great for Imaging things like your OS but for this type of purpose a better commercial product is to be recommended --the decent backup programs are only about 45 - 50 USD in any case --usually a WELL WROTHWHILE investment - both in time (recovering from Windows failures etc) and saving data - which for a lot of people is MORE VALUABLE than their ENTIRE MACHINE !!!.

Imagine re-ripping 2,000 CD's (or more) / finding old music from iTunes etc (to say nothing of music you might have got from "alternative sources". Same with photos, important scanned documents, office spreadsheets / presentations etc.

Added -- If you create a bootable ACRONIS backup based on WINPE then Acronis WILL support data spaces as "Disks" so you can "image" them as "Disks" with the bootable version -- the standard bootable version based on Linux doesn't support storage spaces but can backup the disks sector by sector.

Here's how to create the WINPE 4 version of Acronis 2014

https://kb.acronis.com/content/46255

Cheers
jimbo

 

[lehnerus2000]

Seems unnecessarily painful.
Unless you are about to run out of drive letters, you may as well just add another drive.

I can see some benefit to a server having this ability assuming you can "hot plug" (Novell was one of the setups I studied in my Network course)

 

[margrave]

As for the original topic ... Hard Drive Reliability. Not much is being said.

 

[georgeks]

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

I do think that you should read this one here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf BTW: I have 2 WD Velociraptors...they rock!