Portable hard drive help

[Roger Batts]

I have a portable hard drive that has failed, but is still under warranty. Any ideas how to recover the data from it without sending it to a specialist before I send it back to Western Digital? I have a lot of music and videos on it that will be hard to replace otherwise.

 

[Jacob Dryer]

Do you know if the drive itself failed or if it's just the enclosure? If the drive failed there are a couple of recovery programs but I've had mixed luck with those, just depends on how bad the drive is. If it's just the enclosure you can buy a new one for $20-30 and put the drive in there and be good to go..

 

[Richard L]

Roger,

Since yours is a portable drive, the data cannot be recovered by conventional methods like a bad boot drive can.



If you plan on sending the drive to a data recovery specialist to have the data extracted, be aware that it is very, very expensive.



We had one of our surveryors loose his hard drive and we could not read anything from it. The surveyor had nearly two months of surveying work for a job that was starting in a few days, and we had to get that data back quick. We paid over $2000 to have the data recovered and writen to a portable drive. I was a bit higher because we wanted express service and got the recovered data within 3 days, but it's still pretty expensive without the rush job.



...Rich

 

[Roger Batts]

JD, it's a proprietary case by Western Digital. I don't even see how to open it without destroying it. I have a lot of iTunes music and movies on it that would be a pain to replace.

 

[MikeSondra Grossen]

Wouldnt your music/movies still be in your Itunes library? then download again to a new device?

 

[Thomas Rogers]

Just why I don't recommend external HDs. Most people think they provide good backup, but my experience is they are less reliable than internal drives...typically because of poor design and poor ventilation of the external enclosures.



To all folks; spend the same amount of money on an offsite backup subscription, to a service like Carbonite, etc.



TJR

 

[Richard L]

TJR,

I disagree that portable drives are neccessarily less reliable than internal drives. Hard drives are manufactured by only a handfull of makers and their quality control is pretty good.



Most internal hard drives only have a life expectancy of about 5 years, while an external/portable hard drive can last much longer since it is not always on. Many portable drives are just small cases and connectors that house standard PC or laptop IDE or SATA hard drives, so it is not the quality of the hard drive that causes failures



Complete drive failures are rare but are usually the result of the motor or bearing failures which comes from constantly spinning the disk. In many cases where a drive has errors that prevent the PC from booting up can easily read all the data and files if connected to a PC as a slave drive



Of course a RAID system would be the ideal configuration, but most people do not need that for a home system. Businesses use RAID because they have users that need to always have access to the data and cannot afford to take the entire system down to replace and restor a bad disk.



I have been using external hard drives to back up my PC's for years and have never encounterd any problems.



Currently I use a Toaster style external drive unit that allows me to back up my desktop, Laptop, Netbook and my office laptop on a a single 1-Terabyte hard drive. I schedule my desktop back ups weekly with the standard Microsoft Back up that comes with Windows-XP. I have been doing that for over 2 years and it has not failed me yet. If I something important on my computer like my taxes, etc., I will force an immediate backup of that directory just incase.



...Rich

 

[Thomas Rogers]

Richard L,



I said "my experience" shows them to be less reliable. Of course, YMMV.



I understand that the same few manufacturers make drives, and they get placed internally and externally.



My point was that I see higher failure rates for the external drives than the internal drives, and the reason I think this happens is because the external enclosures run hotter than the typical PC case...and I assume because many folks leave the external drives on all the time...much of the time.



TJR

 

[Richard L]

TJR,

I see and accept your point of view. Surprisingly, hard drives do not get that hot in external enclosures. My experience is that many Hard Drives get hotter in PC cases where they are exposed to more heat from power supplies, CPU's and other heat producing components.



Most external hard drive enclosures remain fairly cool when compared to internal hard drives.



That is also what I like about the Toaster style external drives adapters, they don't enclose the drive at all and you have a switch to turn them on or off as needed.



I really think the problems people may have with external/portable drives is that they emphasis the "Portable" aspects of the drive. They think the encloser is ruggedized and can be knocked around without hurting the drive....that is not true.



I have noticed that typical laptop drives do not last as long as a desktop PC hard drive. I think that the portablility of the laptop leads to it getting knocked around a lot more than a desktop, and portable hard drives typically get knocked around a lot more than laptops.



If you want hard drive backup reliablitly I would recommend getting a Toaster style drive adapter. Ideally, a solid state drive would be the most reliable, however they are very pricey (about 10 X more than a coventional hard disk drive) and currently have limited storage capacity.



...Rich