It happened once again. Another hard drive bit the dust :(.
A 4TB Western Digital Gold Data Center HDD (model: WD4002FYYZ) decided to bite the dust spontaneously. While this occurred before and caused significant data loss, I have been preparing for this scenario for quite some time. Besides running two drives in RAID 1 for redundancy, I had a third drive that accommodated “expendable” data: interim downloads, assorted scribbles, and memes. For the life of me, I cannot figure out if my current phone holds more family pictures or memes. Most probably the latter. I digress. It appears as tho I’m in the market for some new storage…
How could this happen?
While in Texas, I ordered three of these enterprise-grade drives – roughly five years ago. All drives got deployed simultaneously, though two were in RAID (mirrored) for redundancy.
All was well until the day of our relocation overseas. You can undoubtedly relate if you have ever experienced a long-distance or – much worse – international move. From sorting out items no longer required to dealing with notoriously incapable freight companies, the chaos it involves must be as close to hell as it gets.
As my luck would have it, the shipping company obliterated most of our belongings on their voyage. I’m not just talking about a few broken cups and plates. My rig, housed in a Corsair Obsidian 900D case (read: extremely large and sturdy), was packaged in its original box, enclosed by thick layers of styrofoam. When it arrived, the box alone looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer or baseball bat to it. The case was hardly recognizable, mobo, GPU, PSU, and everything else was damaged. The best thing I did at that time was to insist on insurance. Unfortunately – with hindsight – I miscalculated the damages because I did not consider the beating the hard drives had taken, possibly because they looked untouched from the outside.
SHTF
It has been over three years since our move, and all I had installed was one of my drives from my RAID setup. Why? Beats me, perhaps laziness? 4TB was somewhat enough for a short while – though I did miss out on most of my Plex library.
About a week ago, I decided to install one of the remaining WD drives. After formatting and encrypting with LUKS, I transferred some of my data. I cannot stress this enough: while performing actions like these, copying the files is always better than directly moving them (cut & paste). This is something you don’t want to discover the hard way. I ran the transfer overnight to save some time, hoping it would complete sometime the next day.
To my surprise, the following day, my OS spit out several warnings about missing permissions?!?
Trial & Error (Data Loss)
I tried everything. At this point, I could not move files FROM the affected hard drive again due to “permission issues” – time to check the connected drives for errors.
Slowly things are starting to make sense…
New Beginnings
While this was no reason for celebration, I quickly recognized that this would be an excellent opportunity to justify the investment in new storage to my financial advisor (aka wife).
Data safety is paramount. Encountering data loss is downright terrifying. Doing my due diligence, I decided to go with Western Digital again. Here is what I am looking at.
I know folks easily get riled up comparing Seagate and Western Digital, but the deciding factor was longevity and the fact that I should have nothing to fear with two of these bad boys in RAID.
Conclusion
Losing data is a royal pain in the ass. If crucial data gets lost, you will pay dearly for data recovery services like those offered by Kroll Ontrack.
WISE WORDS FROM THE IT GODS:
Work out a sound backup system, including on and off-site backups.
PS: See my update on this article: New HDDs – I’m pissed!
