Drive Death

So I got back from my tour and found two internal 500GB SATA drives in my Mac Pro rig went down --Each within days of each other (I had been remote accessing my system all the while on the road and noticed the first one died a few days ago, then I got home and heard the horrifying chattering of a stuck spindle coming from the second one). One was a volume dedicated for my soft synth library (personal sample library and factory content), and the second was a clone of that.  So I lost the primary and the backup basically at once.  Most of the data is replaceable, and Daniel has a copy of our custom Hednoize sample library, but I'm sure I lost some stuff I won't know is missing for awhile, and I did lose some recent stuff, like some kits I programmed in MachV 2 that I used in my remix of ALPFD, which I'll have to reprogram, which of course takes time, of which I seem to have less and less.

At least I got some satisfaction out of throwing the drives across the room a couple times before stomping on them a few times and boxing it up to send back to western digital.  I could've take a dump in the box for them too, but that would've probably been overkill.  And not very nice to the hard-working US Postal Service, especially at this time of year.

The point is that while I know this is going to happen with all hard drives at some point, I'm sick of it, and as much as I backup (I'm up to three clones of my boot drive for example), I always end up losing some data, somehow.  I currently have about 16 raw SATA drives in and out of several computers at my place, and I have to get at least 4 of them warranty replaced annually.

I seriously need a couple Drobo's.  If you haven't heard of them, check it out.  Amazing, simple redundant backup that'll let me use all these extra SATA drives lying around and take the sting out of a drive dying.  I can't believe I've gone this long without getting one.

I guess I was holding out for a long time for RAID5 on the Mac, which is a redundant solution, but stricter in it's requirements to work (all four drives need to be the same size, for example).  I bought a software solution called Softraid based on an email exchange with the developer, who said they would have Raid5 implement

ation "probably in six months."  That was May 2006.  As of December 7 2008, still no Raid5.  Thanks for nothing.  I'd like my $129 back.

Note to self:  "Don't buy an application based on it's future potential to maybe have a feature you need."  Duh.

Anyway, Drobo FTW.  Apparently you can r

ip out 3 of the 4 drives while you're reading and writing data and that sucker will still chug along, rebuilding all your data on the final drive.  Crazy. 

And as excited as I am to have 4TB SATA drives, the mechanical problems inherent with them are not going to go away.  Maybe the sound of bad bearings will just be 4 times as loud.  ;)

Bring on the large capacity Solid State Drives.  Read this in depth AnandTech article about the SSDs Intel is making, particularly the sections on how long they last, and what happens when they fail. Cool.