hard drives Archives

5 Mistakes to Avoid when Backing Up Data

Backup and Recovery, Cloud, External Hard Drive, Flash Drive, Securitybackup, cloud, hard drives, optical driveOphtek, LLC

Nov 2017

Backups are crucial for keeping your organization’s data safe and readily available in the case of any data emergencies, but you need to backup correctly.

Your data holds an untold amount of value for your organization, so you need to ensure it’s looked after and handled correctly. Backing this data up should be one of your organization’s primary objectives and, in truth, you’re probably already doing this to some degree. However, are you doing it correctly and to the best of your abilities?

There are so many different methods and techniques used for backing up data that it’s possible you’re not utilizing them all correctly. Let’s take a look at 5 of the biggest mistakes you’re making and how you can avoid them.

1. Not Backing Up What You Need

We use so much data now on a day-to-day basis that it’s difficult to keep track of exactly what we use and how much value it has to our operations. And this is why so many organizations fail to back up their data effectively. It’s vital that you carry out a rigorous analysis in order to prioritize the data which has to be backed up. Naturally, business objectives and operations change, so you need to regularly audit your data to maximize the value of your backup.

2. Only Backing Up Once

A backup can be the difference between your business being able to operate and being stranded in a scenario where there’s no data to operate with. However, what happens if your backup data is corrupted? Or if your storage options fail? Therefore, rather than relying on just one backup format, rely on several. Backup to optical drives, hard drives and cloud systems to guarantee you can retrieve your data when you need it most.

3. Not Testing Your Backup

It’s nice to have all your data backed up in case of an emergency, but do you know for sure that it actually works? And do you know how to fully retrieve your data? This knowledge is essential for ensuring you can reinstall your data, so you need to run regular tests to make sure that your backup routine works effectively and that you know how to execute it.

4. Running Out of Backup Space

You may have the most fantastic and effective backup system in place to take care of your data, but what happens when you run out of storage space? Well, you’ll find that you simply can’t store all the data you need to and this could be disastrous for your organization. This is why it’s very important that you assess your storage needs not just for the present, but also for the future as preparation is key when it comes to storing data.

5. Not Automating Your Backups

We live in such a busy age that it’s getting increasingly more difficult to stay on top of everything and backups are no different. Whilst manual backups may give you a sense of control, they’re also opening you up to failure as humans are more than capable of making mistakes or simply forgetting to start the backup process. Most backup systems have automatic capabilities, so don’t make the mistake of relying on your memory, automate the process.

For more ways to secure and optimize your business technology, contact your local IT professionals.

Why Do Hard Drives Crash?

hardware, Uncategorizedcrash, hard drivesOphtek, LLC

Sep 2015

When your hard drive crashes you’re at risk of losing a lot of data, so learning why hard drives crash is vital for preventing this and recovery of data.

Hard drives, like almost any product containing electrical or mechanical devices, are prone to failure. And they always seem to pick the worst moment to fail e.g. in the middle of running a huge report!

Let’s take a look at exactly how hard drives can crash to get a better understanding of what’s happening to your hardware.

Hard Drive Head Crash

Hard drives store their data magnetically on a rotating platter and this data is transferred or extracted from the platter using a read-write head.

In normal operation this read-write head effortlessly glides along a surface of air just above the surface of the platter which is made up of two protective layers.

This confers protection to the fragile data held on the hard drive, but unfortunately read-write heads can easily scratch through these layers as a result of the following:

Wear and tear to the read-write head can cause it to drop
If the drive is dropped when running the read-write head can be forced into the drive
Debris entering the hard drive can damage the surface

The most obvious way to spot this fault is by the clicking noise the hard drive will create as it tries to run as well as visible scratches on the platter’s surface.

Spindle Motor Failures

Hard drives spin at remarkably high speeds (with an average RPM of 7,200), so it’s no surprise that the spindle motor which spins the hard drive undergoes excessive stress over its lifetime. This is why the spindle motor is prone to failing and why you’ll struggle to interact with the hard drive as a result.

This type of failure, again, will be characterized by clicking and whirring sounds as the hard drive struggles to operate in its normal fashion.

Electronic Failure

Hard drives, of course, aren’t 100% mechanical devices. Our old friend electricity is also pulsing through the veins of hard drives. And this sets up hard drives for a particularly heavy crash.

You see, there’s a printed circuit board (PCB) in between the hard drive and the rest of the computer. It helps send information to and from the hard drive so that you can use all the functions of your computer.

Electricity, though, is a powerful source of energy and can often damage the PCB due to power surges; this leads to a total breakdown in communication for your computer and is characterized by a non-responding hard drive and those clicking sounds as motors fail to startup.

Logical Hard Drive Crash

Finally, we have a type of hard drive crash caused by non-physical means which makes pinpointing the source of trouble very difficult.

Hard drives need data to run correctly, so if this data is slightly corrupted then you’re going to struggle to even boot up your system.

But how does data become corrupted?

Well, there are several ways that this can happen:

User error e.g. deleting essential system files
Viruses can cause hard drives to crash within seconds of turning on
Driver issues can cause hard drives to perform erratically
Software malfunction

Hard drives, therefore, can crash for a number of physical and non-physical reasons, but by looking for the signs and understanding your computer’s history you should be able to get closer to repairing the hard drive.

For more ways to secure and optimize your business technology, contact your local IT professionals.

Best Hard Drive to Invest In

hardware, Office IThard drives, office IT, storageOphtek, LLC

Mar 2015

Which is the best hard drive to invest in? With many brands to choose from, we’ll disclose our findings from our best source so you can secure your data.

Backblaze, a large data center that offers online backups, has published a new report to advise on the best hard drives to use. Their results are based on the numerous hard disks they use to run their business.

With over 34,000 active hard drives onsite holding 100 petabytes, they have plenty of experience for anyone interested.

Last year we published an article based on the best hard drives for reliability and durability. To recap on our research, the most reliable brand was Hitachi GST 1.5TB and 3 TB capacities and the least were the 3TB Western Digital and Seagate drives.

Note that Backblaze’s observations are based on a limited range of brands which include Western Digital, Hitachi and Seagate drives. They do use Toshiba and Samsung drives, however, their numbers are not quite as many to provide statistical results.

In this article, we’ll drill down to which drive models last the longest and work the best.

Considerations based on this study

Since Backblaze is a growing online backup business, they need cost effective solutions that give the best results, which is why there are more hard disks being used in particular brands than others. That’s not to say that they’ll never try out more expensive hard disks out in their data center.

Another consideration from their study is the exclusion on energy efficient drives, such as the Seagate LP (low power) 2TB drives and Western Digital Green 3TB drives. These two drives are just not suited for running a 24/7 online business as their power saving feature makes the drives spin down aggressively when not in use, causing them to wear down faster. They had also noted plenty of errors with these drives due to the latter.

Seagate drives

With the 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda LP drives, it’s been observed that they’ve been consistently good with an average age of nearly 4 years. Their annual failure rate is not the best at 9.9%, but it’s not the worst either.
On the other hand, the 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 has around the same durability as the LP model but with 25.4% annual fail rate, which worsens as they age.
The larger 2TB to 4 TB, like their smaller 1.5 TB versions, are also very reliable but do play up as they age. These include Seagate Barracuda 3TB, Seagate Barracuda 3TB XT and Seagate Barracuda 3TB LP, which all have over 7 % annual failure rate at an average of 1.5 to 2 years.
The exception is with the 4TB Seagate Desktop HDD.15, with an average age of 0.3% and a reliable 3.8 % annual fail rate.
Seagate drives are consistent in their performance, perhaps not the best, but they’re really affordable, which is why they make up most of Backblaze’s Hard disk inventory.

Hitachi drives

The 2TB Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K2000, 3TB Hitachi GST Deskstar 5K3000, 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 and 3TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 all have an average annual failure rate ranging between 0.9 to 1.5%.

Their average age is 2 years. These are really reliable, as shown in the statistics and are by far the best performing brand out of the lot.

The only drawback is their premium price.

Western Digital

The 1 TB Western Digital Green (WD10EADS) and 1TB Western Digital Green (WD10EACS) are durable drives with an average age of 4years.
However 3TB Western Digital Red (WD30EFRX) has only an average lifespan of 0.5 years.
The average annual fail rate of these, with the exception of 3TB drive, is 3.4%.
These drives are the second favorite to the Hitachi ones, but are also priced higher than the Seagate ones.

Smooth drive operation statistics

In a large data center, such as Backblaze’s data center environment, certain brands run smoothly and work well within their disk array configuration-without creating too much work!

The following are the percentages of untroubled operation by brand:

Out of 12956 Hitachi drives, 99.99% are active pretty much all of the time with only a mere 0.01% trouble rate.
Out of 933 Western digital drives, they’re active 99.83% of the time and only recorded to trouble 0.17% of the time.
Out of 12459 Seagate drives, they’re active 99.72% of the time and have a 0.28% trouble rate.
Out of the three brands, Hitachi offers the most resilient hard drives with 96.9% survival rate in three years.
The batch of Western Digital Drives have some dying off near the start of implementation.
The ones who survive the start are likely to keep going and have a survival rate of 94.8% after three years.
The Seagate drives start off strong but drop off as they age. Their survival rate after 36 months is 73.5%.
Seagate drives have a reputation for good performance but can suffer as they age and are really affordable.
Hitachi offers the best performance in terms of reliability and durability but at the cost of a higher than average price for a hard drive.
Western digital is a good all-rounder brand to use. Backblaze highly recommends the Western Digital 3TB Red (WD30EFRX).
The ones they advise to avoid are Seagate 2TB LP and Western Digital 3TB Green drives, as they’ve not worked well in their environment.

Overall summary of Drives

It’s been approximately three years since Western Digital acquired Hitachi’s 2.5″ hard drive business. Toshiba has also acquired Hitachi’s 3.5″ hard drive business. Could this mean a change, possibly an improvement of quality in any of these brands? We will have to wait and see.

For more ways to secure your data and systems, contact your local IT professionals.

How Reliable is your Hard Drive?

Uncategorizedbackup, hard drives, storageOphtek, LLC

Nov 2014

Your hard drive contains irreplaceable data, pictures and personal info. A new Backblaze study gives us insight on the most reliable hard drives out there.

We’ve compiled a summary based on Backblaze’s new findings on hard drive reliability, covering the brands that tend to fail the most and how often it has been reported.

Backblaze, a backup service provider, has data centers that hold more than 100 petabytes of data on over 34,000 drives, impressive right? They’ve done all the hard work in testing a wide range of hard drives, some of which have failed and others that have remained in full working order.

They began documenting their study in January 2014 and have since updated their observations.

Here is a summary of what you need to know:

The worst failing drives have been the 3 TB Western Digital and the 3 TB Seagate. This has been tested from 3,846 Seagate hard drives with an average age of 1.9 years and an initial 9% annual failure rate, which is now up to 15%. From the 776 Western Digital hard disks tested, the report shows that they have averaged 0.5 years in lifespan and had an annual failure rate of 4%, which has increased to 7%.
Interestingly, the HGST drives (previously branded as Hitachi) have been the most reliable brand with their annual failure rate averaging around 1% out of over 1600 tested hard drives in the datacenter.
Despite Seagate and Western Digital having a poor reliability record compared to the HGST drives, the reliability on these two problematic brands have continued to perform better with the Seagate 1.5TB and 4TB sized drives, along with the 1 TB Western Digital drives.
Western Digital and Seagate’s 3 TB drives continue to be the worst performers. One assumption could be that these drives may buckle easily under a datacenter environment. Another possibility could be due to a difference in how they run within a drive farming setup (using enterprise drives) as opposed to removing them from external USB hubs.
From their extensive testing, Backblaze noted that the standard external USB drives, such as Seagate’s 3TB (priced at around $100 for consumers), performed just slightly better than enterprise drives which are over double the price!
There’s also a big difference between different hard drive models and their failure rates. Seagate’s Barracuda range has two different 3 TB drives, with Barracuda XT performing nearly three times as well as the struggling Barracuda 7200.14 model, with a 15.7% annual fail rate.
The same goes for Seagate’s 1.5 TB drives, such as the Barracuda LP, performing significantly better as a hard drive with an annual failure rate of 9.6% compared to the Barracuda 7200.11, which has a 25% fail rate.

Overall conclusion

When it comes to looking for a reliable hard drive, especially those that are of 1.5 TB and 3 TB capacities, we have a clear winner and that is the HGST brand. One thing is clear; there’s no hard disk that is ever 100% fail proof, even the HGST drives have been noted to fail at times. The highest HGST annual fail rate of 1.4%, from over a thousand tested hard disks, is still a very impressive record.

Regardless of your hard drive brand, model and style, it is extremely important to replicate and backup your data on a regular basis, as you never know when a hard drive will fail.

We hope that Seagate and Western Digital improve their current 1.5 and 3 TB drives and pay attention to this continued study. Although most drives will come with a 3 year warranty, in the event of a hard disk failing, this shouldn’t be much of a financial setback to their customers.

For more information on storage for your office or home based business, contact your local IT professionals.

Tag Archives: hard drives