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Terabyte envy. want a 15er
19 years???! Damn, then you really got your money's worth.
Laurie
Wndows defrag needs at least 10% of your hard drive free to run. Never go below this amount and never fill a HDD to its maximum. In other words, you should have 100 GB free for every 1 TB if you want to keep your old HDDs alive and ticking.
Likewise, SSDs don't like to be filled all the way up either. The more you have an SSD allocated, the less it has available for wear-leveling. When you reach 80% of capacity, it's probably a good time to start checking the sales.
Macrium:Reflect also has a verify option.
Macrium:Reflect also has an important anti-ransomware feature. This feature "locks" your backup files and prevents anything outside of the Reflect application from creating, modifying, or deleting them. It's easy to disable in case you need to perform some file-operations on them (for example like when I cycle an old backup drive back into action and I want to completely delete all old backups on it before starting anew).
The hard drives were throwing fits when I moved files. They clattered, sometimes my screen went dark. Sometimes the computer crashed. That's what makes me wonder if I was killing the hard drives.
I too have hard drives that old and are still have solid vitals. But I invested in a dozen SSD 2TB externals (because they are iddy bitty tiny things you can toss in your pocket during an emergency evacuation) But I also bought six new WD 2 TB drives and lost 3 within the first two months of use. I also have old PC's I can't kill and have seen the newer generations of notebooks fail within a year. I was told by a Best Buy Tech that they expect to use the replacement warranties on new models because the expected life is 12 months or less. They don't make things like they use to.
Laurie, the hard drives were not 19 years old. I started with Poser 19 years ago, and went to DAZ Studio soon after it was introduced.
Sounds like bad sectors.
You can also run a utility that does a byte-by-byte comparison of two folders or files. If anything went wrong during the file copy that skipped or mis-copied anything, that will find it and you can fix the issue and do the backup again until it works. I found that very handy when I once had some memory go back and start to do a tiny number of random bit flips during backups, it might have been years and too late before I figured out the corruption had happened and what files were affected, or I might never have tracked down problems to that as the cause.
so who still has their 5MB hard drive?
I don't.. but I still have a couple of my 20MB hard drives which I look at every blue moon for nostalgic reasons
Give it five years, and an Exabyte HDD will be $200.
A few years back, I worked as the office organising person for this... eccentric chap who ran a 14-man company and was legit baffled by how much more efficient old-fashioned ring binders was compared to just dumping all his papers in a heap on the desk (and sofa, and nearby crates, and...) Imagine the worst disorganised office seen in a sit-com, and you have a very realistic idea of what the work environment was like.
He had a server standing in a corner, as a relic from a former company of his when he'd been in a partnership. When I first started working there, I would pester him about getting it back up and running, because I wanted to be the IT administrator I thought it would be useful, but he had "lost the password for ever," so that never happened. He also flat out refused to do backups of what stuff he did have on his laptop, because he insisted that external HDDs just wipe themselves clean regularly, while lying miles away from anything magnetic. I asked what he would do if his laptop died, but he brushed it off with that being what the (constantly broken) printer and our physical folder system was for.
So the lesson here, kids: You can't trust technology. The only way to store your DS files is to 3D-print everything, and put all of it in a random selection of cardboard boxes. If you run out of room in your home, you can always rent some run-down old house that no one lives in, and use that for external storage.
Signed, TigerAnne - Demotivational Activist.
And the amount and file size of the content we have purchased will have grown proportionally.
Yeah, I will be disappointed if Genesis 9 characters don't have mitrochondrial DNA.
reading mixed reviews on the ssd drives. they have a short life span?
i would love to use ssd for my content libraries.
and they quiet.
seeig the 2tb ssd coming down to the 200 range.
I probably have some old PATA drives in a storage bin. At this point, I just need to drill them out and recycle/dispose of them.
Your numbers are way off. A year and a half ago, I bought six 3TB hard drives for a total of $300. Here is an 8TB hard drive for under $200. You can even get 16TB for $450.
Depends on how much data you write to them. This test found no problems on 8 drives at the 22 TB level - or, as they say in the first article in the series (link is to the last) the equivalent of writing 20 GB per day for 3 years. They started to see some issues after 200 TB of writes. . .which would do a number on most standard hard drives.
yeah my two 4TB drives were under $200 each and Australian dollar sucks
Yea.. the speed increases far outweigh any potential issues.. just make sure it's backed up regularly, and you're good to go. I've moved most things over to NVME now.. just a 4Tb drive left in there now for rendundancys sake.
SSD's, as a whole unit, will last for a reasonable number of writes. However even with wear leveling algorithms cells will still fail. Depending on the length of time the drive as a whole lasts this loss of capacity may or may not be noticeable.
If you want your SSD's to last as long as possible you should do your best to buy the best quality drives, Samsung is the best.
My suspicion is that your hard disks were failing before you started doing whatever it was you were doing that caused the noise. In my experience, bad power has been the biggest cause of electronic flakiness. Get a good UPS machine with brownout support (i.e. it will kick in extra power when your running power source is too low and will filter out highs). I've been buying pricier ones that claim to have "pure sign wave" abilities, even though, they are digital sign waves...so...not exactly pure. According to product listings, this is supposed to improve lifetime of electronics.
Old fashioned hard drives have moving parts controlled by conventional motors. Power outtages and dirty power are really hard on those motors and the physical components that read/write from those platters. So, once you spend a couple hundred on a nice, fat HDD with room enough for your runtimes, plunk down another 150 or 200 for a good UPS to make sure that it lasts as long as possible. Otherwise, you will probably have to replace it sooner.
I use DIM for Daz purchases as more straightforward, even though I install my content to about custom libraries. I use the manual method for other content, and also manually copy the customer-facing files as it suites my work-flow.
Hard drives wear out, trying to prolongue their lifespan by altering your processes to something you prefer less seems like the technology is not fit for purpose.
I also use SSDs for everything but backups, and when they get a bit cheaper, they'll get used for that too.
my mobo has a slot for ssd chip, i'd have to pull cards out to lay NVMe in there.
i imagine it's the quietest.
what about the western digital?
They all wear out, but what's important to consider is that when there are no more writes possible (what folks usually mean when they say "wear out"), they can still be read, making them effective backups
good to know! thanks.
easier than trying to prune my runtime.
yeah, my research a bit dated. doh
WD sources their NAND from multiple sources which includes Samsung. Samsung only uses Samsung NAND. That's why Samsung is the best option.
Thank you so much for all the informative and entertaining comments. I decided to delay the purchase of a new hard drive for another month. It wasn't hard to make the decision. I've struggled with DAZ Studio for many years. I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and some undiagnosed learning disability. Any time I try to "make art," I suffer tremendous Panic Attacks, my brain freezes, along with other dramatic effects. I am totally confused by the way DAZ organizes their assets. That is why I started to manually install my stuff beginning in 2000. Unfortunately, manual installation is too exhausting and time consuming. I end up taking long breaks during which my creativity slumbers.
In addition, I decided to pay some overdue bills. Life is so much simpler when you step up and do the right thing!
Oh wow be careful what you buy