Moments of terror - loosing a HDD and the key data... Well almost!
Wow - I've just had a few hours of terror as I cam home to hear my Maxtor Onetouch III 1TB external HDD clicking away and no longer in explorer... SCARY!
A few quick searches on the web and looks like I'm toast - so ironic as we have had a few HDD failures in our team over the last month. I just knew I should have backed up all those new baby photos we had been taking (I'm a dad now for 3 months).
After looking on-line and deciding that a fee of up to $2,000 and a distinct lack or warranty cover from the vendor I decided that I should take my chances and pop off the lid...
It's was a luckily escape - I had the 2x500Gb drives configures in a Raid 0 set-up so when I disconnected the faulty unit and booted up the drive the the other one is working fine - so I'm mid back-up now.
I've only ever had two HDD issues and both have been external HDD units (actually both Maxtor units as well) I'm losing confidence and my wife is losing confidence in my ability to protect our key data. All I can say is thank goodness I had it in Raid 0!
It does pose an issue what do I do now so a few questions I'd love input on:
- Can I put an off the shelf SATA drive back in the enclosure to replace the toasted one?
- If so can it be any SATA drive - I guess it must be the same size i.e. 500Gb
This is also the CHKDSK from my other external HDD - I use this as an offline back-up but as you can see it returns some data errors - should I throw it out?
Bottom line is how should I protect my home data what's a good solution that's not to crazy, caters for not too much intervention and will let me know an issue exists in advance?
