Salvage data from a dying hard drive

[Anupam]

I am aware of that.

[rhiannon]

I had a 1 TB WD Green that failed after a month. There are comments in several hardware forums and online retailers such as newegg about the green drives failing.
The Western Digital site has this to say about the Green drives:

"WD Green hard drives are designed for use as secondary drives in PCs, for external enclosures and other applications for which low noise and low heat are beneficial."

So, don't use it as an internal hard drive and don't use it too much or you'll overtax its delicate sensibilities. :-O
I replaced it with a 1T Seagate ST1000DM003 SATA- the Seagate drives whose numbers end in .11 (such as

7200.11) are not reliable but there seems to be no problems with the others. I haven't had a bit of trouble with mine.

[Anupam]

Thanks rhiannon. Well, the drive was not being used as an OS drive, but it was being used as a data dump drive, and had important files on it.

We didn't knew earlier that WD Green drives are not that sturdy. We thought they were. Well, now we know. Still, as long as the warranty is there, we have to make use of it. Will keep in mind not to use it much though, and treat it as a non-reliable device.

[rhiannon]

At least they have a 2 year warranty, but if you can't get the data off of it a warranty doesn't do a whole lot of good.
I didn't know they weren't that sturdy either until mine died. I wouldn't have guessed - WD makes good hard drives. I have a 1TB WD Caviar Black that sits in a dock on my desk, I use it to store drive images and other data for backup. No problems with it at all.
All of that is backed up on an external hard drive. I like redundancy when it comes to my data.

[Anupam]

That's true. A 2 year warranty does not safeguard your data, or get it back when the drive goes bad, because the warranty does not cover taking out the data from the faulty hard drive. That's the way world operates. But, it's food for thought though, that while the drive was in warranty, it went bad, and therefore, the loss of data should be their responsibility. People put so much of trust in their drive and bought it... is it their fault the drive went bad in the warranty period?

It's all about money. The Green brand of drives are cheap, so they don't give quality with it. The Black brand are costlier, and therefore have the best quality.

Yea, redundancy of data is good, specially with the important data. However, not everyone can afford an external drive and an internal both. My friend is not very rich. He did have 3 internal drives in his system, including this one, and the other two were older and of lesser capacity. We did make very important data redundant on one of the drives, but still, very big data like the wedding videos which take a lot of space had to be kept in this 1 TB hard drive. Fortunately, it's good that he had already made video DVDs of them and had given to his customers... otherwise he would have been in real trouble today. So, not much important data lost, but still, data was still lost.

[rhiannon]

Originally Posted by Anupam

That's true. A 2 year warranty does not safeguard your data, or get it back when the drive goes bad, because the warranty does not cover taking out the data from the faulty hard drive. That's the way world operates. But, it's food for thought though, that while the drive was in warranty, it went bad, and therefore, the loss of data should be their responsibility. People put so much of trust in their drive and bought it... is it their fault the drive went bad in the warranty period?

Not their fault at all. I like the idea that vendors should be responsible for data retrieval if a hard drive goes bad but I don't think we'll ever see it.

QUOTE=Anupam;92255]It's all about money. The Green brand of drives are cheap, so they don't give quality with it. The Black brand are costlier, and therefore have the best quality.[/QUOTE]

Sad, but true. My experience is that even the ones considered the best die after a few years, though the WD Black Caviar drives have a 5 year warranty.

Originally Posted by Anupam

Yea, redundancy of data is good, specially with the important data. However, not everyone can afford an external drive and an internal both. My friend is not very rich. He did have 3 internal drives in his system, including this one, and the other two were older and of lesser capacity. We did make very important data redundant on one of the drives, but still, very big data like the wedding videos which take a lot of space had to be kept in this 1 TB hard drive. Fortunately, it's good that he had already made video DVDs of them and had given to his customers... otherwise he would have been in real trouble today. So, not much important data lost, but still, data was still lost.

I don't have any video stored on my system, I can't even imagine how large video files must be.
As far as I know everything used for backup (DVD, CD, HDD, SSD, Flash Memory etc.) is fallible eventually. When I buy a music CD I burn a copy and use the copy.
I don't store anything of importance on a flash drive - having had a few become suddenly unreadable for no reason I could see cured me of that. Brand name didn't seem to matter.

[Anupam]

Well, since the flood in Thailand, even the warranty on the hard drives have reduced. And the prices have doubled . Earlier, warranty was 5 years, and since a few years, it's 2 years now. This leaves very little for the end users. They can only hope and pray that the drive does not get bad. The quality has also reduced. I have an old hard drive, 8 GB PATA of Seagate, from 1999, and it's still running solid, whereas I have seen many newer hard drives fail in a few years.

And yes, you are correct, you can depend on nothing. Eventually, whether it's a DVD/CD, flash drive, external drive, internal drive.. they all give up after a few years. They all have a finite life. Still, I find DVDs atleast more reliable, since if you handle them carefully, they can last upto quite many years. But, with flash drives, or external drives, you never know when they will fail. More so, if they are in regular use.

And nowadays, data is really becoming unmanageable. As the capacity of the hard drive increases, so does our data. There are photos, movies, videos, songs, documents, software... all wanting a load of space.

It never gets easy, does it

[rhiannon]

Originally Posted by Anupam

And nowadays, data is really becoming unmanageable. As the capacity of the hard drive increases, so does our data. There are photos, movies, videos, songs, documents, software... all wanting a load of space.

It never gets easy, does it

There always seems to be a few bumps in the technology world, that's for sure.
Prices have been going up. Luckily I haven't had to purchase any new drives for quite a while.
My internal drive gets a workout, the other two not so much. I don't have them on unless I'm using them. I use them for backup.

There have been a lot of wilderness fires where I live. None have come close thank goodness, but I have a box full of items that can't easily be replaced ready to go just in case, but as far as technology goes, I can just pop the SATA drive out of the dock and go if there's no time to grab anything else.

[Anupam]

I tried running TestDisk on the drive. TestDisk was able to see the drive, but when trying to locate the partitions, it gave Read error. That was the error I got when I had tried to initialize the disk too.

It was beyond hope. I gave the drive for replacement.

Thanks for the help everyone, much appreciated .

[kendall.a]

It may be too late, and this may not even work, but I just ran across this and thought about you:

http://www.fact-reviews.com/info/diskfresh.aspx

DiskFresh Product Overview
Storing data on your PC’s hard drive is by no means permanent or reliable. Without proper care and maintenance the hard drive could lose valuable data over time. Prevention is the best strategy for keeping your data.