Hi Everyone,
I've got a burning query relating to Data Storage and I'm hoping for some invaluable opinions and guidance from the all knowledgeable members of Geeks to go
As long as I can remember I've had issues with data storage, whether it be filling up my top of the range 120 GB hard disk back in the day or losing invaluable data to a failing hard disk. As many of you out there, over the years I have accumulated a wealth of data that holds a resounding sentimental and functional value to me. This data is currently spread across 2 x 2 TB Western Digital My Book Essential external disks as well as an array of flash drives and optical media.
Today I have plugged in one of the aforementioned Western Digital My Books into my Windows 8.1 operated ASUS only to be confronted by the dreaded click of death. The drive booted up fine and I was browsing my files for some time before the click of death began, it went through a few attempted spin cycles and a dialogue box appeared dutifully notifying me of the hardware malfunction. Following this the drive could no longer be read by my machine, I tried all 4 USB ports as well as multiple restarts of the drive without success. I then took out my old Acer laptop off of 2008, brushed off the dust and cobwebs, filled it's batteries and booted it up. Once the old beauty had booted I plugged in the seemingly dead Western Digital to be once again greeted by the familiar knocking of the disks guts. The disk continued to knock for a good number of cycles before the Windows XP powered Acer showed me hope. The disk was successfully recognised by the Acer laptop and was assigned disk designation 'F'. Double clicking on the F I was greeted by further success, the file structure seemingly intact as I browsed my glorious archive of 1's and 0's. I am now in the process of slowly but surely moving each folder from the Western Digital to a new drive where it shall hopefully stay corruption free for many moons to come.
The problem I am faced with is that this is not the first time I've had the click of death, nor will it be my last. What can I do to stop this happening? I recently lost my Father which makes some of the data (photos etcetera) truly invaluable.
I was looking at buying a WD My Cloud EX 2 unpopulated and follow it up with a couple of the new WD 6TB disks to make a 12TB raid machine (this way it will be future proof) but will it be reliable? What are the most reliable ways (other than multiple hard disk backups) for me to ensure I will never lose my data?
Cheers
Edited by The Gas Man, 03 November 2014 - 12:16 PM.