First, install a fan right in front of your HDDs if your casing allows for it. Second, get an air-conditioner for the room the computer is in and set it to freeze.

That's up to your casing and your budget. Personally, 40°C isn't a bad temperature and I wouldn't bother going to the hassle of migrating my hardware, unless the casing was due for a replacement and I have been salivating after another case. I've replaced my six-year old cap ayam casing for a sweet little Bitfenix Shinobi case only last year, despite having plenty of spare cash for most of that period.

If that is your reason, there is only one real solution to it, a mirror image in another HDD. Perhaps in an external HDD to make offline backups easier. All these temperature, vibration, voltage regulation control methods simply cannot preserve your data better than an actual backup copy.

Only about 10 hours for USB 2.0.

Depends on the size of the data that you wish to backup. If you want to backup an entire 1TB HDD, you would need at least a 1TB external HDD.

If by backup, you also intend to compress your data to reduce the space needed, then it really depends on the data that you are backing up.

For videos, audios, and pictures, compression will tend to be very poor, and sometimes even be larger than the original size. There may be some programs that can 'successfully' compress such multimedia content, but what they actually did is to permanently reduce the quality of your multimedia content to save space. In short, compressing multimedia content is usually not recommended unless you know what you are doing.

You already have a backup if you have a second copy of your data in another location. So simply copying your files to an external storage device qualifies as backing up your data.

It typically resumes from your original warranty period.

I've done it before and it worked for me. It only temporarily fixes a particular mechanical failure, the problem would reappear once the HDD has warmed up. If your HDD is failing or failed for another reason, it won't work for you.

In this case, I don't know if the refrigerator trick would apply or not. But I do agree that making backups now would be a good idea.

Tapes can still fail, and none of them are guaranteed for centuries on end. The only human technology known to last millennia are engraved stone tablets. But with modern technology, we can now upgrade from stone tablets to diamond tablets*. With diamond tablets our precious porndata can now last for millions of years!

* We can manufacture diamonds straight from carbon, without mining them from the ground. But we will still need to develop the technologies needed to create diamond objects of arbitrary size and design.



Bringing up tapes is a bit silly. It'll be cheaper and easier to just buy multiple HDDs and RAID them. So let's please stick to the topic.

This post has been edited by everling: Jun 14 2012, 05:41 PM

It isn't the most reliable storage mechanism. While tape or optical media is stored offline, you wouldn't know if they get damaged by a bad storage environment or self-degradation (optical media) or not. I have a number of friends whose anime or video collection burned to DVDs has self-destructed since they last burned it a decade ago.

The most reliable storage mechanism is a live and highly redundant RAID array, where you can detect failures and replace unusable HDDs as needed.

Furthermore, not only you are assured of data availability, you also have instantaneous random access to any of your data. It is something that both tape and optical media cannot provide, as you will need to locate the appropriate tape or optical media and load them before you can access them. Again, once burned to DVDs, it is extremely rare to see anyone going through the effort of locating and loading them into DVD-ROMs and watch the contents at a whim.

Sorry, but I forgot. It was a long while ago and my friends used a large variety of brands, from the cheap to the expensive.

CDs are actually much more suitable than DVDs and Blu-ray for long term storage, because their data pits are many times larger and it will take that much longer for oxidation to erase these pits. Of course, you have to pay for all the extra discs, burn 7x more discs, and store 7x more discs than you would in DVDs.

For corporate, it is probably more due to tradition and conservatism that they use tape backups. Or perhaps they don't really plan to touch the tape backups ever again once they are created and perhaps don't really care if data is lost. Active RAID storage for pure backup purposes that are not likely to be used at all would simply incur more cost than off-line tape storage.

Iianm, currently there are no hybrid drives that have 30GB of NAND and 500GB in platters.

External HDDs with USB 3.0 will perform about the same as external HDDs with Thunderbolt, both has maximum transfer speeds that exceeds what HDDs can do. You might see a performance difference if you used SSDs instead of HDDs, but that is more expensive and wasteful.

Copying files over and over will normally not cause data loss. It could be bad RAM as sotong168 suggested, or it could be that you have bad sectors, or that your HDD is dying. I would recommend doing a full HDD scan and checking the SMART attributes. You can use the HDDScan software that is linked in the first post.

Just don't accidentally knock or tip over the casing that housed the HDDs. RAID with only two HDDs only protects you from hardware failure in one HDD. If both HDDs are damaged at the same time...

Off-site doesn't mean it is on the cloud. It means that the backup copy is not located in the same building or site. It may be stored offline (not powered) or online (powered and accessible to a computer), but doesn't say if the backup may be accessible over the internet or not.

At least that was what I had learned back then. Maybe the meaning of the terms have changed.

Rare. Expensive. Too troublesome to use, except on things that you intend to burn and forget, emphasis on forget. And they are mostly claims, unless you can verify for yourself about twenty years or forty years down the line, which you probably won't bother because it would be a lot of work or CD/DVD readers no longer exist (hah!) or you have forgotten about it.

Perhaps the old HD Tune 2.55 that you are using is bugged and doesn't correctly report if your drive is on the verge of total failure? You might want to check with some other utilities.

Also, please note that SMART is not a guaranteed signal for health. HDDs are known to fail even if they don't give off any SMART signals of failure. If we were to make an analogy, SMART is like the medical doctors from 100 years ago, who didn't quite understand how our bodies fail.

Which HDD model you are having problems with and what is your problem?

Seagate has been returning you different models and capacities for that one original HDD? If that is the case, it may simply be a case of really bad luck. If possible, you could try to see if you could escalate and demand that they certify that the HDD is sent to you in good working condition or something.

Or perhaps maybe your PSU is in a bad condition now, and has been damaging any HDD you plug into it? Or it could be a bad SATA wire? You may need to test with another desktop.

This post has been edited by everling: Jul 8 2012, 10:55 PM

Unstable power supply can cause motor damage. I have had a couple of HDD failures, but never had any since I changed my PSU to a good quality one - could be just luck or it could be the good PSU is good for my HDDs.

Any PSU with the 80+ certification should be good and there are a few sub-80+ PSUs that are also good. There are quite a bit of PSU reviews, but if you want a list of suggestions, you could try looking for an existing related topic or open a new one in the HW Q&A forum.

It could be a problem with the PSU.

Here's a recent topic on the matter, which also contains suggestions of replacement PSUs: PSU 450w EXPLODED with ASUS GTX 550