Ok wall of text incoming, I'll try to keep it straightforward. I want to note at the start that I know a thing or two about tech and have always kept my HD's in vibration isolating mechanisms (Antec cases are big on this I had a SuperLanBoy and now a P183) with a 120mm fan blowing over them to keep them <95 degrees F.
I've been using collecting for awhile. I don't collect everything and I don't feel a need to never delete *anything* but I DO like keeping scenes that stand out as good to me as well as stars i like (they go into a folder called names). Anyways I eventually set aside a 1.5TB drive for porn. It wasnt full or anything but I wanna say that after 2-3 years I had about 800GB or so. That kept increasing over the years and I think it was floating around 1.2 or 1.4TB at last count. To protect the innocent and my legacy I keep my stash in a Truecrypt volume. <- kind of important
Anyways at some point (September 15 2010 to be precise) I set aside a 2TB drive and copied everything over setting the 1.5TB Western Digital Green into my firebox. This 2TB was another WD Green drive that I thought would be great for bulk storage. For 2~ years that was true though I noticed a bit of weird behavior from the drive, sometimes it would take awhile to spin up, sometimes my machine would slow down a bit while reading files off it - note this is a dead giveaway that your HD is on to rocks, look at SMART data and windows system log ASAP. This weirdness was not common or consistent but prudence dictated I transfer to a new drive and perform some in depth tests on this drive/maybe RMA it.
Around the time I was going to do this I got a traveling job that would take me across the US visiting Marine Core bases. Cool I thought I wont be without my HD's so I placed them in the plastic cases OEM drives come in and wrapped them up in my clothes and off I went. I had 4 drives in total with me:
1 3TB video drive for my movies/TV
1 2TB drive for other video/video games/music/misc
1 2TB porn drive that had been acting up
1 2TB transplant drive for the porn - I planned on working on the organization while on the road
I was a little nervous taking the drives with me since I'd be moving all the time but hey what are you going to do for 5-6 months on the road? Note I was not in a lot of major cities and was trying to save money regardless. Anyways all the drives seem to hold up ok though the wonky one acted up a little more with slow transfer speeds sometimes, ironically the USB 3 dock I had with me stopped the hard drive from locking up my system when it had bad blocks etc due to the way Windows handles USB devices vs Sata.
So I get back from the road and say fuck this first 2TB I need to RMA it post haste (My hard drives are in the PC now). Low and behold it has 2~ months left on its warranty. I tried copying some newer files off of it to the new 2TB but no go, I say fuck it its only 50-100GB of porn and I can re-download it. The other drive wasnt showing up in my computer but I didnt think anything of it since it was using a molex to sata power connector that had come loose on drives before. At this stage I dont know if I could have gotten all of the data that had already been duplicated onto the new 2TB off of it but I think there was a pretty good chance I could have recovered 80% or so.
Sometimes I'm lazy, most of the time I do things professionally with care and consideration. I make a point to think things through and make the best choices I can. In the back of my head something was telling me to adjust the new 2TB and verify things before RMA'ing the bad 2TB. But the new 2TB hadnt given any problems and I knew i had a pretty good 1.5TB in the firebox with 60%~ of the data on it. This was one of those times I was lazy. I shouldnt have been. I put things off and RMA'd the drive. 2 days later I wanted a fap break and tried getting the lazy new 2TB online. Only after much troubleshooting did I determine it was dead. Not even spinning up dead.
Fuck.
Something that helped this happen is that I hide the drive letters of my porn drive(s) in windows to again make things less obvious and keep things tidy. My Computer looks like C:, V: (video), W (video2) and thats it. Z doesnt show up. Only drive X shows up when I mount it in Truecrypt. If I'd noticed that the newest 2TB porn drive hadnt booted up at ALL for the last week or so I probably would have investigated. I wish I could say I was busy but really I had the time, I was just feeling tired and uninterested. Anyways.. so the failure to start up at all was interesting to me. It's not super common in a drive thats worked fine for 1~year already. Since newer hard drives cant just swap PCB's anymore and I didnt want to try desoldering/resoldering and adapting a new PCB I found a service that does this kind of thing Donor Drives LLC. For $60 they will find a compatible PCB and pull the relevant data off your old one and install it into the new one. Fine I said, sounds like it's worth the cost. I get this back from them:
Dear xxx,
Our technician finished the diagnostics of your hard drive and was able to determine that the original PCB was defective and required a replacement. We used a compatible board and after a necessary adaptation, were able to test the drive for any additional failures it might have had. Unfortunately we determined that the drive had suffered from a burnt pre-amplifier chip as well. The hard drive HDA (Head Disk Assembly) contains multiple heads that are in charge of reading the data from the platter surface and Pre-amplifier, in turn, is responsible for the functionality of these heads. Generally this failure occurs after a hard drive suffered from a powerful electrical shock or, in more rare cases, due to physical damage. Regular wear or a manufacturing defect may also cause it. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crashBurnt Pre-amplifier is considered to be a mechanical failure and in order to retrieve any valuable information still located on the drive, an advanced data recovery service is required. A quote for such service is attached in this e-mail. If you’d rather not proceed with the recovery, we can provide with details on return shipping. Alternatively, we can securely dispose of your failed HDD free of charge as part of our new responsible e-waste recycling program. We are very sorry that your hard drive failure could not be solved by a less expensive means. Please get back with us if you have any other questions about any of the proceedures and processes. We will gladly go over everything with you.
Understanding Pricing
Yes, the data recovery prices are generally high, but keep in mind the following:
Our company specializes in providing the parts, tools, and support to other data recovery companies and specialists. We are advanced hard drive and data professionals, and have the staff with the necessary equipment to process any data recovery case. Occasionally, in order to maintain stable workflow for our technical staff, we do provide our own data recovery services. Because Donor Drives does not advertise data recovery services, our prices are generally half of what a professional data recovery service provider would quote for such failure.
----------------------
I've read all the MaxPC and anandtech/tomshardware articles on hard drives and I'm an old member of
http://www.storagereview.com/ and still have my old drives in the HD survey. I've gone as far as reading a whitepaper or two but I am not 100% on HD's and the intracacies of their failures. I try to pick reliable models at good price-points and treat them well.
Notice that first paragraph and how they link a pre-amp failure with a head crash? I *could* be wrong here but im 95% sure a head crash is just when the write head slaps the surface of the spindle causing damage to the platter (corrupting some data) and maybe the read head. Not the thing that controls the HDA. Could it just be poor writing on their part or intentional misuse of jargon to confuse and intimidate? *shrug*.
They quoted me $1,132 85
Now this is not *completely* unreasonable depending on what needs to be done. I've seen companies ask 3-5K for platter transplanting and other such wizardry. They need cleanrooms and I'm sure some of the work is high skill needing fine motor skills, in depth understanding of whats going on and some little experience. But heres the thing - they didnt spell out very well in the invoice what needed to be done to my drive other than "mechanical data recovery service" and some info on their policies. Yes I *could* have called and interrogated them about what was up, yes most people aren't likely interested in the precise details or well informed enough to understand them but w/e. I wasnt going to drop $1,132.85 trying to keep my porn collection perfectly up to date. Especially not when I had a 1.5TB in my firebox with much of the data on it.
I told them I wanted my hd back and very quickly received this:
Dear xxx,
We are sorry to hear that you do not wish to proceed with the recovery of your data. Unfortunately there is no other way to retrieve data when a hard drive has this type of failure, and normally it will only get worse with any additional time in transit. Considering that your data is of great importance to you, we can give you a one-time offer of $200 off the original quote price. This price includes the recovery process, a brand new external hard drive that we will transfer your data to and return shipping. Please let me know if you would like to reconsider, otherwise you hard drive will be shipped out promptly.
Alex Didek
Sales Manager | Donor Drives, LLC
--------------------------
That's a bit suspicious no? An instant $200 off? But then again maybe its one of those cable bill things, threaten to cancel and suddenly you get a huge discount for 6 months. Maybe they're a little low on business and are legitimately trying to drum up some work. I still didn't go for it. Still under the circumstances I do wonder what % of people that send them drives for the service I did get a similar chain of emails.
I should note that modern hard drives park their heads when you power down in a special ramp thats well away from the platter so headslap is basically a non issue when transporting them. That being said other things can happen like the platters tweaking the bearings or extreme shock messing things up. All the drives were WD Greens from similar families using mostly the same components (if one was subjected to failure inducing circumstances the others were too). They stayed in peaceful hotel rooms sans coke fiends and wild parties. They were always wrapped up and packed very well when we traveled. I'm still not sure how much of an effect the traveling had since one starting to fail drive (the initial 2TB) was still going at the end. My other two (non porn) drives that came with my are still working perfectly despite being older and being way more heavily used than the porn drives.
So here I am with my dick in my hand and my 1.5TB plugged in thinking god damn the only two hard drives I've lost in 6+ years are the backups of each other. Oh well I'll just get on with organizing/downloading too the 1.5 ...FUCK YOU IM GOING TO THROW ATAPI AND BAD BLOCK ERRORS IN THE SYSTEM LOG HAHAHAHAHAHA FAGGOT.
Yeah. This drive (which was NOT on the road) from the firebox is failing too. it went from 2 Current Pending Sector Count errors (when I noticed a problem and opened CrystalDiskInfo) to 151 during this attempt to extract as much as possible to a good drive. Funny enough I'm using the RMA replacement of the first 2TB for this transplant procedure.
So what do I do now? Just accept that porn is immoral and that God doesn't want me to have it? FML. well I guess
stealing porn is immoral... I guess you got me there God. I stand by my statement: FML.
A few life lessons to be learned and re-learned:
-Backup your data kids. Back it up often.
-Don't keep the backup drive in use in parallel to its counterpart for 8 months. Disconnect it, put it in one of these
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008JA ... d_i=507846 and put that in your firebox till next backup. Preferably in your friends firebox or burried out in the yard wrapped in plastic in case of fire/flood. The burying and plastic-ing interfere with the frequent backups.
-Maybe don't take your hard drives on the road with you, this is still a *maybe* since they were kept in roughly one of these the whole time:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IY ... d_i=507846 - I'm inclined to think I was struck by the Gods, Sodom and Gomorrah style for my pillar of salt worthy collection =P
Three fucking HD failures like this... all of the same data. FML.
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