Am I the only one that has had a problem with my external hard drive crashing? Last year I had one crash (I believe it was a Maxell), and tonight my SeaGate did the "Click of Death".

I had every wedding backed up on DVD, but some of my stuff wasn't...like things I was working on for my business and some family photos.

What's up with these freakin' hard drive problems?! I'm so annoyed that I have to reorganize my stuff again on another hard drive (from DVDs).

Does anyone have a better way to avoid hard drive meldowns?

We have all our stuff on a Buffalo hard drive. It's 2 TB for about 1K. One TB mirrors the other. So if one fails you have it backed up, go buy another and it backs that up. Haven't had it fail yet. I have had many Western Digital fail, and a Seagate internal, but that was right out of the box. I feel your pain. Everyone will experience this, so it is wise to be prepared, and put your money into a system that works like a raid system. I believe that Drobo, makes one as well. Good luck.

We used to have crashes occasionally. We have a small fan blowing on the hard drives and that seems to have stopped the crashes. They have a tendency to overheat, which can cause them to crash, and even if they have a fan in them it is not enough.

this is why i hated my lacies. always had problems, no more cause i got rid of them!

for some reason, the power supply to the lacie harddrives is or goes bad at some point.

To avoid overheating, when they're not in use, turn them off! I don't just mean when you shut down your computer, but there's lots of computer things I do that I don't need my externals for so I just shut em' down. …as often as possible.

Alisa had 2 crash within a month. A local guy recovered everything for her and it was less than $200 ea. I can get his info if you'd like to send them to him.

Jessica, could you PM me that info.. My external has never crashed (thank God!) but it's info that I'd like to have handy. I've heard too many horror stories of external's crashing. Thanks!

I will get the info from alisa tonight and send it to you

I have a two-part backup process:

1. Everything gets saved on a Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB drive. Thankfully, this has never crashed.
2. Everything gets backed-up off-site via Mozy. Inexpensive and reliable.

Again, I've not lost any data yet but I'm hoping this strategy will keep me safe.

buy 2 of every external drive.. copy the files to both and you have a great redundant backup without the mistakes or trouble you'd have with a RAID system.

+1
This is a good choice.
I use a Linksys NSLU2 as a mirrored backup for my primary 500gb drive.
All of this was instituted after my own drive failure that set me back $1200.00.
This is a Linux modified system that is quite cool...but a PITA to set up for the uninitiated.
I have a post about this here if your interested -
http://sandaviphoto.blogspot.com/2008/01/b...inksys-nas.html

I do not have a Drobo, but I will bet this is a much easier setup and a better way to go than my route.

I have a drobo. Just got the drives for it last month. I'm liking it so far.

This is what I do. Keep one on-site, the other off-site. Bring the off-site one home occasionally to backup and hope the house doesn't burn down overnight while the drives are together. If that's really a concern though, I suppose you could keep the backup in your car overnight.

All drives will fail. I like Seagate/Maxtor because they have a five year warranty. Data recovery isn't included in the warranty, but at least I would get a replacement in case of failure. And with proper backups, I don't need to worry about failure.

That's what I do. I used to keep the other external in a safe deposit box, but now since I have an office I keep one here, and one at home. I have a small portable HD that I xfer back and forth with.

You have to have redundancy. Even if you have a RAID or drobo, you still need to have it backed up some other place. What if your office was broken into? Pipe busts in the wall and soaks it? Stuff can happen beyond just failure. Nothing is more important to our business than our files.

Hmmm. There are lots of replies about what to do in case it happens (mirrored RAIDs, NAS, Drobo), but not too many on how to get them to stop. I think that's what the question was.

As Lynn mentioned above, get a fan. Seriously. I don't know why people don't follow this advice more. In our first year and a half of business we had three hard drives fail. Everything was backed up so it was more of a PITA than anything (and the cost of replacing the drives -- OUCH!).

Ever since I put a desk fan blowing on the drives, I haven't had a single one fail. I've had drive issues, of course, but they were mostly directory problems and not physical problems.

We have a hodge-podge of brands. I usually buy the drives and enclosures separately. Two that came put together and are the same brand and everything -- one has a fan in the enclosure and one doesn't. So you can't necessarily go by the brand of enclosures. And usually the drives in the enclosures are different.

Oh, I take that back. I had one start to "click" recently. But then I realized that it was on the other side of the desk -- nowhere near the fan. It wasn't a drive that was used much -- I just had a big transfer going.

So, even though I know no one will take my advice -- GET A FAN! You can even get a cute one for under 20 bucks, if you want. I can't guarantee it'll help, but it sure couldn't hurt.

Adam took my idea, as well as someone else, shoot who was it. Anyway, keeping your drives cool is really important. Also my IT brother in law said for me to stop moving them from place to place all the time, which to me defeats the purpose, but whatever. He said "Portable drives are somewhat sensitive. They don't like being taken from place to place. Even a small bump in the car can cause data loss. The other big issue is that they can be lost or stolen or damaged in a fire. I would suggest either backing up to DVD (and keeping them in a seperate location) or even better yet, using some sort of on-line backup tool. That way you are protected no matter what. You are like us... your data is all you really have. Even though it sucks to spend money on backup when you may never use them, you will be glad the one time it saves you."

I wanted to share a drive I detest and a drive I love. Detest: the Western Digital MyBook 500 GB Love: the SimpleTech 1TB The Simple Tech was inexpensive, it always has worked flawlessly on both my computers and I can't wait to buy another one so I can transfer all my data off my WD and then have a contest outside my shop to see who can throw the WD the furthest. Anyone want to join me?

The Drobo rocks Loooooove it.