OT: Data Recovery

[Michael Butash]

Thanks for the pricing info, better than expected I'd say.

Yeah, I stopped buying Seagate when they acquired Maxtor.  Really don't 
know what you'll get, a real seagate, or a maxtor born to die with your 
data on it.  They're all a bit sordid though, all the big fish swallowed 
the smaller ones now, you really never know who or what (crap) you're 
getting.

At least before acquisition of Maxtor, Seagate was somewhat enterprise 
oriented, and kept decent drives even for consumers. Maxtor was absolute 
shite, never had success with either their enteprise-ish drives, and 
their consumer drives were atrocious.  I remember buying 7 maxtor drives 
to use in a raid5 around 2002, and most died enough to destroy the raid 
and my data in under 6 months.  I lost a fair amount of my napster's 
greatest hits collection, got pissed and learned the hard way never to 
buy Maxtor.

When Seagate bought Maxtor, I extended by proxy my sworn hatred for 
Maxtor, and never bought either again.  Your experience tells me little 
has changed.

IBM had already screwed me with the "deathstar"/deskstar debacle around 
then too losing a handful of drives instantly then too.

WD was removing TLER function from bios to force upgrades to 2x cost 
same drives becoming predatory.  Last time I bought WD, it didn't work 
oob, and have lost several over the years in other uses in shorter than 
expected times.  Scratch.

Hitachi was decent until they bought IBM's drive businesses after 
deathstar drives made ibm a hated word with consumers, but still ended 
up the "best" through most of the 2000's for me.  I lost a 3tb and a 4tb 
within months from Hitachi a few years back with the advent of 4k sector 
drives, and basically just stopped buying spindle drives all together.  
I still have some 6yr old hitachi 512k 2tb's driving my filer with good 
smart status, anything after was crap.

I pray my old hitachi disks in my nas will last forever as I dare not 
bother replace them with current garbage I can rely on for 6mo max, but 
mirror really important things between 3 other systems regularly plus 
backup to a usb flash.  I can't even use my old server nas with 4k 
drives to upgrade anyways, ugh.

I've only bought ssd's in the past 3 years, and expect to replace them 
6mo-1yr regardless, and am not often disappointed with my forecasting 
how I use them (raid+crypto+lvm).

Short history of my adventures in crap drive vendors, if still reading, 
does anyone have any actual success story with a modern drive?  I just 
assume no one makes anything to last anymore. Everything made these days 
seems to be garbage with imminent fail (pun intended) to even try.

-mb


On 06/02/2015 03:46 PM, Eric Cope wrote:
> not at all.
> The failure ended up being two-tiered. The first problem was a 
> firmware failure. The fee to recover the first pass was $395. After 
> the first pass, they recovered my critical data successfully, however 
> it was discovered there were 2 heads that were failing. There was data 
> that couldn't be recovered without replacing the heads. They offered 
> to take it into their clean room for $750, replace the heads, and 
> recover the rest of the data. I didn't need it (it was my brother's 
> data and he was too cheap to pay for recovery), so I opted not to 
> continue the recovery process.
>
> FYI - if you have data on Seagates, get it off: 
> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/
>
> Eric
>