External Hard Drive - routinely check health/bad sectors?

[eoren1]

I do my processing on a Macbook and, out of necessity, my processed photos live on an external 1 TB drive. I clone the drive every 2 weeks to have a physical backup in case of drive failure. I have been wondering lately about the potential for bad sectors and other corruption issues. Figure if it were to happen on the drive, I likely would not know. The cloned drive is done as incremental backups so presumably it would hold intact copies. I was wondering if anyone runs a disk-check type program on their externals on a routine basis. And no, RAID is not an option :wink
Thanks
E

[Zerodog]

I do my processing on a Macbook and, out of necessity, my processed photos live on an external 1 TB drive. I clone the drive every 2 weeks to have a physical backup in case of drive failure. I have been wondering lately about the potential for bad sectors and other corruption issues. Figure if it were to happen on the drive, I likely would not know. The cloned drive is done as incremental backups so presumably it would hold intact copies. I was wondering if anyone runs a disk-check type program on their externals on a routine basis. And no, RAID is not an option :wink
Thanks
E

How come RAID is not an option? I am running a Lacie Big2 Quadra. It is a dual RAID system. Works with Mac or PC.

[eoren1]

How come RAID is not an option? I am running a Lacie Big2 Quadra. It is a dual RAID system. Works with Mac or PC.

Cost...
I've got the drives in externals and can't see spending the $200+ on a raid system right now.
The concern only came about when i started looking at 2 tb drives and read a number of comments about bad sectors showing up with <1 month use
My friend and I have also just had a very bad experience with synology's nas - 1 single bay; other raid - that I'm hesitant to invest in one. I may look into a raid/zfs/drobo system when usb3/light peak comes to an iMac and I can future proof to some extent while realizing better throughput. For now the goal is to keep the system together for at least 3 months

[Art Scott]

I have found seagate 1.5tb drive (external freeagents) for around 70 at wally mart.......I also keep 3 copies of each....main drive and 2 clones.....if corruption happens I can fall back to one of the other 2 while my main drive is off for replacement........and of course all finished full sized jpgs are finding there way to my SM account.

[eoren1]

Art
I was looking at some 2 tb drives from samsung and WD for 80 and would swap them into the current enclosure.
The thing is, how would you know if you developed bad sectors on an external? I write to the drive when moving raw files from the MacBook to the external after they are processed. I then clone (incremental) every 2 weeks. I don't read from that drive otherwise so I would never know if data was becoming corrupted. Presumably the clone would be okay...

[Art Scott]

PC has check disk and the defrag apps....I do not know anything about Mac...........I am sorry......My main drives are for actually working on the raw files and the clones are strictly back ups, so I am constantly pulling files into PS from the working drives....unless I am on the road and then my 2nd 500gb drive on the laptop is my working drive.....Sorry I could not help.

[Dan7312]

In the past I have user SpinRite from grc.com to do that. It does, among other things, remapping of disk blocks that it sees as likely to fail in the future. I know it supports drives from Mac's but the program itself boots a DOS clone to run so I don't know if it will work on Mac system.

Drives have gotten better now or I've become more lazy but I don't run it any more.

I do my processing on a Macbook and, out of necessity, my processed photos live on an external 1 TB drive. I clone the drive every 2 weeks to have a physical backup in case of drive failure. I have been wondering lately about the potential for bad sectors and other corruption issues. Figure if it were to happen on the drive, I likely would not know. The cloned drive is done as incremental backups so presumably it would hold intact copies. I was wondering if anyone runs a disk-check type program on their externals on a routine basis. And no, RAID is not an option :wink
Thanks
E

[eoren1]

I thought so too Dan and hadn't thought about bad sectors or corruption in years. It was only from reading reviews about the new 2 tb drives that I became concerned. Maybe those drives are on the bleeding edge.

[Snowgirl]

Try Onyx on your MAC. I use the same FreeAgent externals that Art was talking about - double copies of everything. I don't store any photos (other than some websized versions I use for my blog or Facebook) on my iMac or MacBook Pro. Everything is stored on an external and backed up to another external the minute they come off the memory cards.

Every few months or so I go back and check to see that everything is ok. So far, so good.

[Hoodahmahn]

For Mac, I run SMARTReporter (http://www.corecode.at/smartreporter/) -- {knock}{knock} has been a real data saver! For drives, I use several Seagate FreeAgent Go, LaCie Neil Poulton drives as well as my NewerTech Voyager Q drive dock. I do keep copies of photos on my iMac, however, all photos are also copied to at least two external drives as well as being backed up to my server and dumped to disc or flash drive. Of course, now I can add JPEG backup to SmugMug.

I'll add a NAS solution later in the year.

[Overfocused]

A lot of the 2tb issues are with firmware and etc since they are relatively new. My brother in law had problems with both of his Seagate 1TB hdds when 1tb was the state of the art. The partitions magically disappeared (at random times not both at the same time) and the HDD cache was showing as the hard drive (16 mb partitions). They are firmware issues as far as I can recall


We did get them fixed but it took weeks to figure it out, I forgot now since we wanted to shut that out of our minds, haha

[jchin]

When you "clone" the files from one external to the other, have it do a read/compare after it writes to the 2nd external. That is one way to check that you have a good copy of the file on the 2nd drive.

[jdorseydesign]

One of the problems with external drives, be they USB or Firewire, is that programs can't get low level access to the drive (which is what is needed to check and repair bad sectors, like what spinrite does). One solution is to acquire and older PC machine with IDE and SATA ports (it doesn't even have to be fast) and use it just as a "spinrite" machine. Take drives out of enclosures and check them in that machine directly attached to the IDE or SATA ports.

Personally I don't care if my drives get bad sectors, I just make sure I

a) have a clone my mac's boot drive on an external firewire, if the internal drive dies, I can boot from this and be instantly up and runnning.
b) Backup all my important files across my network to my drobo. If a drive in the drobo dies, the light on the front will turn red, and I can just pull the old one out and replace it (even while it's running, it's like magic).
c) Then these important files go from the Drobo to Crashplan's online backup storage.

If a file doesn't exist in 3 places, it might as well not exist.

[Rhuarc]

c) Then these important files go from the Drobo to Crashplan's online backup storage.


I love CrashPlan! I bought several people that I know that live around the country 1TB drives to hook up to their systems. I then networked all of our computers using CrashPlan. Now we all have off-site backup in multiple locations for free! I love how you can send a backup for them to connect to their system, saving the initial seed over the internet from taking weeks or months!

If you know someone who has extra storage on their system, and wouldn't mind you using their system as a backup (maybe if you return the favor) then I highly recommend this! It will also backup to an online service that they provide for a monthly fee.

Ok, sorry, I know I sound like a commercial, I just really love this program! :-P

[VA64Skyhawk]

I have Macs and prefer the externals. All I do is photography and genealogy neither of which require split second response. The USB doesn't bother me since I use "superduper." It does all my backup at night time several times a week. All in all I have three complete sets of drives: Boot 1,2 & three, the same for my data (docs and images). My experience with RAID has been less than stellar. I just don't see the benefit on a system which doesn't require fault-tolerant performance.

Rich