Geekzone giveaway: Crucial P1 NVMe SSD (m2)

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15 posts

Geek

#2135495 27-Nov-2018 20:52

Mine was back in my uni days - I had all my work saved in my computer with no backup (bad idea). The computer was working fine and had no sign of trouble then all of a sudden everything just went black and I was unable to retrieve anything and had to re-do a lot of assignments again...

surfisup1000

5288 posts

Uber Geek

#2135516 27-Nov-2018 21:46

When camera/video storage was limited, went on holiday to the USA with family.

Backed up all my photos and video to the brand new spinning harddrive in my laptop..... got home, and half the files on the spinning harddrive were corrupted.

I was wondering if somehow this happened while going through airport security scanners!!! Very disappointing.

MadEngineer

4271 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#2135520 27-Nov-2018 22:19

Behold, "Ariki". This was my first home/flat server, from not long after the turn of the century. It served me and the flatmates well - started off as a Slackware box with squid and fetchmail in front of a dialup connection shared to four adults. With a few upgrades and time it also ended up with windows 2000 where I played with roaming profiles and was also a media server, hence the video switching in the photo.

I took the machine with me after I left the flat and went to fire it up one day a few years later but both the motherboard and drives were stuffed. No back ups as there was nothing of real importance on it .... aside from its installation and memories of tinkering with the system itself.

You can fire up Quake anytime to have a taste of what that used to be back in the day but you can never get back those old machines.

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.

phire

22 posts

Geek

#2136347 29-Nov-2018 00:26

We had a bare-metal server at work fail one day.

It was an important legacy system, we had inherited it and we were about week or two away finishing the migration it to the new VM based environment.

We booted it off a recovery USB drive and checked the RAID. There was only one SSD showing in the raid array.

"Hmm, I was positive that was a RAID 10 of four SSDs"
"Perhaps it was a RAID 0? Who would deploy a RAID 0 in a production server?"

We didn't have proper documentation for this machine was and the person who built it was gone, so we spent a few hours scratching our head while doing a emergency migration of the applications to the new environment.

It turns out:

It was indeed a RAID 10 of four SSDs
There was no monitoring setup on the system
Three of the SSDs had failed
Due to not having monitoring, we have no idea how long it had been running with two SSDs dead.
Due to shoddy coding, the application was chewing though about a terabyte of writes every hour (the same few large files, flushed every 30-60 seconds), which is not healthy for SSDs
The application had been installed on a RAID of SSDs because spinning drives simply can't keep up with a terabyte of writes every hour.
The battery on the RAID controller had died, putting it into a mode which flushed data to the disks sooner and more aggressively.
Due to no monitoring, we have no idea how long ago that battery failed.
We had backups, but some of the most recent data was missing
The company spent several thousand dollars sending the drives off to a professional data recovery company to get important customer data off.
Turns out the controller chip on all three of the SSDs had failed.
All data was eventually recovered

Lessons learned:

RAID is not a backup
RAID is not a backup
Scheduled backups are not necessarily enough. Make sure your backup strategy matches your use case. Stream the data off, or use redundant replication.
Monitoring is important
Alerting is important
RAID is not a backup.
Don't use drives from the same batch in a RAID.
Data recovery professionals are magical
RAID is not a backup

MadEngineer

4271 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#2136587 29-Nov-2018 13:01

And the backup isn’t a backup unless you’re testing it

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.

OldGeek

893 posts

Ultimate Geek

ID Verified

Lifetime subscriber

#2136743 29-Nov-2018 17:24

My wife had a collection of (predominantly) grandchild photos which she had saved on her PC HDD. Over the years she had become accustomed (I thought - she did the same thing with our accounting data) to zipping those files and cutting DVD backups for (offsite) storage at work. When I came to institute online backup about 2 years ago, I queried her and she said that there were said backups at work. Because there was about 70 gigs involved and we are on ADSL, I excluded that folder from online backup. HDD crashed. New HDD commissioned, bring home the photos DVDs I said. What DVDs she said. Ooops and of course it s all my fault that 10 years of photo history was lost.

Sent HDD to a company in Auckland that specialises in 'forensic data recovery' with NZ Police one of their reference customers. The deal is that if they can recover data you pay, and if not they get to keep the HDD. As it was a WD drive there was a reasonable chance they could revive the drive using hardware components from their large stock of crashed drives with a working equivalent of whatever component had failed in my drive. They reported a head crash that had gauged the platter surfaces so no chance of data being recovered.

Photos from then on now backed up, and every few months she tests file restore still works.

--

OldGeek.

Voyager referral code: https://refer.voyager.nz/6XQR2QG9Q

Detruire

1771 posts

Uber Geek

#2136906 29-Nov-2018 23:22

My biggest hard drive scare was a couple of years ago with my old laptop drive.

One day I was using my old laptop and Windows locked up. I hard reset the laptop several times with Windows failing to boot successfully (hangs/blue screens/freezes). Eventually, I started hearing a clicking noise. My heart sank as I hadn't backed up the laptop in about 8 months, and (even worse) I didn't really know if anything important was on that drive.

Fearing the worst and wanting to put as little load on the drive as possible, I pulled the drive and hooked it up to my desktop. Unrecognised partition.

At this point I was panicking a little, so I can't remember what I did next, but it didn't get me anywhere. As a last-ditch I'm-all-out-of-ideas action, I stuck the drive back into the laptop and turned it on.

It booted fine, I pulled all the important files off the drive, and the drive's been working fine ever since. It even outlived the laptop, which was retired a couple of months ago (the power regulation is ruined and won't keep the laptop powered on long enough to boot into Windows.)

I have no idea why it froze and started making clicking sounds... I'm just glad it stopped!

rm *

Equinox IT

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pom532

149 posts

Master Geek

#2137108 30-Nov-2018 10:55

My large harddrive started dying. I was lucky enough that I was still able to copy from the harddrive before I sent it away to be fixed. I remember looking for any old harddrives to save as much content as I could. The hard part is remembering what you had backed up where...

HcoNmeM

182 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#2137116 30-Nov-2018 11:22

When I was studying I had all my work to hand in on my PC.. I just invested in a zip drive..

Thinking I was smart.. I loaded it all onto a zip disk and went to hand in my work.. little did I know they had no zip drives.. *NOOOO*

So I went home to transfer all my data to floppy disks, as soon I as put my zip disk in.. it died.. *DOUBLE NOOOOOOOO*

I also realised after that happened that I moved it instead of copying it.. *TRIPLE NOOOOOOOOOOOO*

That's the day I decided to go back to being a builder..

But a year later got back into IT and have been for 17 years.. but still.. worst experience with removable media..

Ulairi

25 posts

Geek

#2138174 2-Dec-2018 16:07

I was using a Seagate BACKUP PLUS 2TB Desktop drive as network storage. Connected to the router's USB port. I would back it up every six months or so to another hard drive. After almost three years of everything going fine, the drive failed. Luckily, that was only about two weeks after the last backup, but I still lost a few files.

Seagate replaced the failed unit under their three year warranty. However, I've learnt my lesson and have now setup a Synology NAS connected via Ethernet and using server grade WD Red hard drives. I've also put a UPS in as I reckon that power cuts might have contributed to the Seagate failure.

Moral of the story - don't use a 'backup drive' as a NAS. They're not really designed to be up and running 24/7.

alinz

71 posts

Master Geek

#2138293 3-Dec-2018 04:37

A bright winters day, the year of 2012. The birds sang joyfully; the watery sun shone shyly through the open window; the bitter aroma of coffee filled the the cool air. I raise my head off the pillow and glance one eyed at the bed side clock. Seven thirty-one. 'Just five more minutes' I tell myself; knowing it not to be true. As my tired eyes begin to close, a small foreign object catches my attention.. A black square..

I try to ignore it; it can't be important.

Tiredness turns to frustration as I toss and turn.

Seven thirty-three.

Covers pulled back, I roll out of bed. Where are my slippers? I mutter half-heartedly, as I stumble towards the object.

A Netbook.. Who still owns one of these in such a year?

As I open the lid, the sticker proudly exemplifying it's atom heart sends a chill down my spine. Yuck.

It must be 'his' I exclaim. Only he would own such a thing.

A yellow note flutters to the floor as I move the machine from the room.

"Can you please take a look at my laptop" it reads. "It's been painfully slow lately". 'Since new?' I chuckle.

I press the power button and wander off into the kitchen. Good time for a mug of that coffee. 10 minutes go by as I find myself blissfully distracted by a Pain au Chocolat on the bench. On my return, I catch the final transition from welcome screen to desktop. Sigh. I tap the start orb.. nothing happens. Hmm. Is it meant to be making that crunching noise? I press my ear to the shell. 'That does not sound normal' I exclaim with dread.

After much fiddling the back cover unwillingly releases its grip. It cannot be.. No, there's no way..

A 1.8"? Are you kidding me? I inspect the jank looking adapter and hot glue holding the puny drive within it's 2.5" bay. I suppose they thought nobody would ever know.

'I wonder if solid state drives are a reasonable price yet?'. I look to Sarah's BlackBerry on the counter; still frustrated at having misplaced my Nexus the night before. This will have to do.

$1.43 per gigabyte. Sigh. Seventy dollars for a slow mechanical, or eighty five for a minuscule SSD. I ponder whether the entire machine is worth eighty five dollars.

'I suppose it's the easiest option' I conclude, showing slight defeat in my eyes.

"What are you putting it in?" the man in the store casually asks as I swipe my card. 'An Acer Aspire One' I mumble; shame filling my every pore. He raises an eyebrow and decides not to reply. I don't blame him.

Snap.. snap.. snap. That may be the most satisfying part of this whole experience I joke to myself as the back cover seals shut.

'That's one too many 1.8's for this lifetime'.

stocksp

708 posts

Ultimate Geek

ID Verified

Lifetime subscriber

#2138308 3-Dec-2018 08:31

My experience is the worst kind. Losing photos of the family. I didn’t have backups ( and I know have religious backups - onsite, offsite and online ) - although to be frank I’m moving to have largely online backup.

Blista

7 posts

Wannabe Geek

#2138620 3-Dec-2018 15:39

I still remember building my first PC. It took a lot of plugging things in, taking things out, rechecking everything over and over, before finally accepting that the HDD was DOA rather than anything I had done wrong.

LookingUp

411 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2140312 6-Dec-2018 08:06

I've got a box of dead HDDs, and the memory of some of them failing is traumatic enough that my brain won't let me recall them in detail. Nothing fatal (thank goodness/touch wood), but countless hours spent trying to recover stuff off most of them, with minimal success.

CB_24

366 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2140332 6-Dec-2018 08:44

Many many years back when I was just starting as a PC Technician I was asked to Ghost a customers HDD onto a bigger drive as they were running out of space.

I had pulled their drive out and also had the new HDD sitting on top of the case, went to move it over to another work bench and both drives slid off the case and onto the floor.

Lets just say the customers HDD and the new HDD were completely un-usable after that.

Still haunts me today knowing that happened.

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