Is It Time to Replace Your Storage Drives?

Hello everyone, some recent client events provoked this article.

Do You Use Spinning Drives to Store Your Work?

Any kind of work, not just photos or videos. Documents, spreadsheets, personal finance, whatever?

The answer is very commonly, yes. It could be a spinning drive that boots your computer, but for creatives, it is more often a larger external drive used to store content.

How Old Is It?

It is very important for your data integrity and your piece of mind to know how long that drive has been in operation. Put a sticker with the full date and time on the box when you first set it up. Trust me, just do it.

If it’s been in use for more than 3 ½ years, you are at serious risk of complete loss. You see all mechanical items have what is called a Mean Time Before Failure aka MTBF and as a sweeping but also qualified generalization, most spinning drives, meaning powered drives that use disk platters in a hard disk drive assembly have an MTBF of just over three years. This means that in a large sample, 50% of those devices will have failed by the MTBF time.

Do You Feel Lucky?

With apologies to Inspector Harry Callaghan (look it up), luck only favours the prepared with any kind of consistency. There are only two kinds of hard drive owners. Those who have had a hard drive fail, and those who have not had a hard drive fail. Yet.

Replace It BEFORE Disaster Strikes

If you cannot remember when you installed the spinning hard drive, the probability is excellent that it’s at or past its MTBF date. If the spinning drive had lots of storage and came already installed in some kind of case and cost you relatively little, if it still runs, you are on borrowed time. I’m not trying to scare you, I’m trying to save you pain and loss. Cheap ready to go spinning drives are precisely that, the lowest possible quality that can be sold, and most of these ready to go systems don’t even document the drive in the case or what its MTBF is. There are thousands of horror stories about these prepackaged drive kits that didn’t make it to ⅓ of a reasonable MTBF, and they have come from “good” makers like Western Digital, LaCIE, MaxStor, Seagate and others. The label does not offer a guarantee of top line components. Ask anyone who has asked me, and I always recommend buying a high quality drive and a separate enclosure, but most people don’t do that.

Still even you may have bought an excellent brand drive and put it in a case yourself. MTBF still applies. You simply have improved your odds.

*All these fine workers will not recover your dead drive. DEAD IS DEAD*

But wait you say! There are hard drive recovery companies! I can call them if something goes horribly wrong. Yes there are, and some are really excellent with clean rooms and dedicated experts. They might be able to recover some lost data, but if they can, it will take a long time and cost you thousands of dollars. This is not a good plan. It’s not even a plan.

But what about disk recovery software? If you spend money on good products and they actually recover anything, go buy a lottery ticket because you just hit the jackpot as the odds are much better that they will fail. I’ve been in tech over 40 years and have seen this fail substantially more often than success. Like 80:1

But I Backup!

Good. You should have your original, a local backup on a separate storage system and a cloud based backup. If you have 3 copies, in a disaster, your best hope is that you have two, if you have only two copies, if something happens to your backup, you’re screwed. And if you have no backup at all, well then no one can help you because you clearly don’t care about your stuff.

Having a backup is nothing if you have not tried to do a restore. If you’ve never tried to restore from a backup, you don’t actually have a backup because you don’t know if it worked at all. An unverified and untested backup has no worth.

So What Now?

If your total external storage is up to about 4TB, then buy a new 4TB SSD or NVME based external storage system. Prepare it as required by your operating systems and then use a data cloning tool to copy everything from your current spinning drive to the replacement. Then once you have verified that your information is there, turn off and disconnect the old spinning drive and rename the new drive with the same name as the one it replaces. This is critical because if you use any software that uses standard volume naming in its pathing, that software is looking for that volume name. Cloners should do this automatically but also note that Windows, by design, uses drive letters as aliases to volumes and has an annoying habit of reassigning drive letters when the hardware changes even if the volume name is the same. It’s a lousy model but you’re stuck with it. If you use an operating system based on UNIX, such as macOS, volumes are volumes and there are no alias drive letters. Aliased drive letters came to us with MS-DOS 1.0 and sadly have stuck around since then.

Once you have everything on the new storage, you need to make sure it gets backed up, which means it has to have its own local copy and a cloud copy and that local copy better be the same disk system or larger than the one you just replaced. This means budget for two drives, not one when you replace a drive. Otherwise you may be backing up the new faster and larger storage to the old, slower and probably past its MTBF storage.

What if you have more external storage than 4TB. Larger SSD and NVME storage is really expensive at this point, many would say untenable. In this case buy a Network Attached Storage device. I recommend Synology because I have used them in many clients. Buy the empty chassis and then populate it with the fastest, highest quality spinning drives that you can afford. They will be new and therefore reliable for at least 3 ½ years expected and should one fail, the system keeps working and you can hot swap a dead drive for a replacement and it will rebuild in the background.

I have a client with over 100 TB of storage readily accessible on his network using Synology systems loaded with Seagate IronWolf Pro drives and his is a high demand multi user video streaming use case.

If someone offers you a Drobo, run away. They are crap, the company is out of business, there’s no support and I may have mentioned that they are crap. I bought three Drobos and inherited three more. Every single one of them is dead. And the drives from one cannot be moved into a different model if I could find one that would actually work.

There are other NAS makers, but I only recommend those that I have used in mission critical scenarios. I have never had a client or myself lose data with a Synology and while individual drives have failed, no data has ever been lost. You may in this case choose not have a local backup, but you still need to have a cloud backup in case of environmental loss due to fire, flood, hurricane, Mars Attacks or whatever.

A Dive into NAS

The image below is of a simple 4 bay Synology. A NAS attaches to your home local area network and while most of your home network these days is probably wireless, a NAS needs a wired connection. Fortunately the router / modem from your carrier commonly has two Ethernet ports and if it does not, a decent quality small Ethernet switch can be attached to the router / modem and the Synology plugged into it directly. Any person can do this without having to call in a technician.

Once the box is connected, and before you turn it on, you RTFM to open the cover and load a drive into each bay. Depending on when you buy your drives, you will find whatever is most cost effective per terabyte. Let’s say that you do this tomorrow.

I’m in Canada so I could buy an empty Synology DS-423 for about $560. Then I would go looking for NAS ready drives. Let’s say I spend $138 each on four 4TB Seagate Ironwolf disks. That’s $1092 which sounds like a lot when I could buy an enclosed 18TB drive for a lot less, but then I would need to buy two, one for primary and one for backup so about so about $960. However, if one of those externals goes bad, I have no backup. And if I fill it, I have to go buy another pair of drives. With a NAS, if a drive fails, I replace it with a new drive of the same size or larger, and it rebuilds on its own in the background. If I run out of space, I replace two drives, one at a time and the same chassis now delivers me more storage.

Another client used his Synology and got to about 80% full using 4TB drives. So I replaced them one by one with 16TB drives. No copying, no hassle, I just pulled a drive, replaced it and waited until it was rebuilt and then repeated this for the remaining drives one at a time until done. And all this happened with ZERO downtime, which is good because taking his online store offline would have killed his little home business.

How Do I Get My Stuff From My Old Storage to the New Storage?

I mentioned a cloning tool. For people on macOS I heartily recommend Carbon Copy Cloner. It just works and does a great job. If you run Windows, Acronis Protect (or whatever it’s called this week) has an excellent and proven cloning tool. Both can clone content onto a local drive or to a NAS although on the NAS you will have to handle the volume naming manually if you want to use the same volume names. Note that booting your local computer from a NAS can be done, but it’s not optimal, so you would not use a NAS to clone a boot drive as a general practice.

From a cloud backup perspective I always recommend Crashplan. The company has never let me down for myself or any of my clients. Some other clients use a service called Backblaze. I don’t use it because every time I want it to do something, it seems I would need to pay for some add-on. My choice, make the right one for you, but have a cloud backup. Let me keep it simple. If you do not have an offsite backup, you don’t have a backup.

Wrapping Up

Replacing old storage is not hard. It’s a process, no more than that. And if you go to SSDs as proposed, the current best guess for MTBF on an SSD is 12 years. There is not yet a best guess for NVME storage. Neither have any moving parts to break down, and all are substantially higher performance on reads and writes than any spinning disk system. NAS arrays are also faster on reads because the system can read from multiple physical drives at once. Good NAS systems can also write to multiple physical drives at once if the array software is done in hardware. Software based arrays are functional but are not high performance and are less reliable.

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