[Gllug] OT: Warning - new WD portable drives!

[James Courtier-Dutton]

On 10 June 2011 10:29, James Courtier-Dutton <james.dutton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10 June 2011 10:00, j.roberts <j.roberts at stabilys.com> wrote:
>> On 10/06/2011 06:22, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>>>
>>> On 09/06/11 02:29, Alistair Mann wrote:
>>>>
>>>> general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>  Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>>  Just a quick warning that you might want to avoid Western Digital's
>>>>>  latest USB3/2.5" portable hard drives.
>>>>
>>>> <snip>
>>>>
>>>>>  I'm sure this move makes sense to WD for reasons of speed, space and
>>>>>  cost but personally I wouldn't touch one of these drives with a
>>>>>  bardgepole so I figured I'd best warn you guys in case you'd feel the
>>>>>  same way.
>>>>
>>>> Caddies in general seem to fail much more often than one would expect,
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>> I have heard portable drives are one of the manufacturers main outlets
>>> for "recertified" drives...
>>
>> Aargh! Any sources?
>>
>>> For this reason I have always been a
>>> bit dubious of the pre-made ones, preferring to make my own.
>>
>> We also see a MUCH higher failure rate for pre-built USB caddies (even RAID
>> ones) than for bare drives.
>>
>> We do not see this for ones we make up ourselves, though doing this is not
>> strictly speaking economically sound :) We do not however keep detailed
>> statistics for these few drives.
>>
>> Of course one must also say that USB caddies are much more likely to be
>> dropped, knocked or power cycled whilst turned on than are drives in a main
>> computer case, and many caddies seem to have no, or very little,
>> ventilation.
>>
>> Mind you, that would also apply to the caddies we make up, and they don't
>> have the higher failure rate.
>>
>> I would NEVER trust important data to a non-RAID1 USB caddy, and I'm wary
>>  even then, as I have had over the years various cases of near-simultaneous
>> RAID drive failures... RAID5/6 caddies are not available :)
>>
>
> I find all external caddy type systems prone to failure. Mainly due to
> lack of cooling present.
> I have resorted to off site backups at my home.
> I place a server at my parents house and one server at my home.
> I backup everything onto my server at my home and then use rsync over
> ssh, in trickle mode to transfer all the data to my parents house
> server. For example, a HD video from my camcorder might take a week to
> rsync to my parents house, but it gets there in the end.
> I just wait for the rsync to complete before I erase the SDHC card
> from the camcorder.
>

The main reason I do that now, is that I had an external caddy HD
fail, and within days my laptop HD also failed, causing me to loose
some valuable pictures.
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