|
|
Dan Albrich
Manager, Microcomputer Services
dalbrich@uoregon.edu
For the last several years, it's been possible to buy a larger and faster hard disk for what you'd have paid for a much smaller and slower disk the year before. In recent times we've seen the cost for a "standard-size" disk falling as well. At the moment, it's possible to find hard disks at or below $1 per gigabyte, making even a 120GB disk relatively affordable even when you factor in the additional cost of paying for professional installation.
So what's wrong with bigger, faster, and cheaper? The quality of some hard disks seems to be going down along with their price. Evidence of this can be seen in the Computing Center hardware repair shop, where our technicians sometimes have difficulty keeping up with the number of computers coming in that suffer from failed hard disks.
Even drive manufacturers seem to tacitly admit a decline in quality, as they've uniformly dropped to a one-year warranty from what used to be a standard warranty of three years or longer. We believe the shorter warranty period reflects manufacturers' lack of confidence in their own product, as well as their efforts to limit replacement expenses.
This is not to say that there aren't some real technical problems behind reduced hard-drive reliability. The new disks are being pushed to faster rotational rates and higher surface densities that reduce permissible tolerances. The larger disks also tend to run hotter than older drives, which makes good cooling critical (a factor that's often overlooked). In other words, even if the failure per megabyte of capacity is unchanged, the odds that your particular disk will fail have still increased.
As you know, when a disk goes bad the last thing most users care about is the cost of the drive itself. It's the value of the data that matters. Even home users now have more to lose, given that their data may include irreplaceable family photos or digital videos.
What you can do about it? Of course, the answer is to back up your data. But few of us actually back up our hard drives at all--or if we do, we do it too infrequently. In many cases it will make sense to spend some money on your backup solution to make it convenient enough to ensure that you will actually use it.
The most transparent type of backup solution is buying a PC with built-in disk-mirroring. This type of technology is referred to as RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks). Mirroring, which is also called RAID 1, simply keeps two disks synchronized by making sure that any data written to the first disk is also written to the second.
One such solution is Dell's new Dimension 8300, which you can order with two serial ATA hard disks configured for RAID 1, at a cost of roughly $350 more than the same PC without the RAID configuration. Before you decide that's more money than you want to spend, consider how valuable your data is! (Also note the convenience factor: this solution doesn't require you to do anything at all.)
Unfortunately, a mirror will only protect you from physical disk failure. If someone steals your PC, or your house floods, or if you're attacked by a nasty computer virus, the mirroring cannot protect you. For this reason we recommend you also employ one of the other backup mechanisms mentioned below.
The auxiliary backup method you choose should reflect the size of the data you need to back up. Larger files will probably require an external hard disk, while smaller amounts of data can be conveniently backed up on portable media such as CDs or thumb drives.
External hard disk. If you have digital pictures, music, video, or other large data files to back up, your best bet is to buy an external hard disk. It's possible to get one that supports FireWire (for the modern Macintosh), or USB 2.0 (common for modern Windows PCs), or both.
Ideally, the external backup disk should be large enough to back up at least one copy of the contents of all the disks you have in your PC. These devices allow you to plug them into your PC and have the drive mount as if it were another internal hard disk. You can then drag files and folders over to the disk just as you would move files normally.
Maxtor offers an innovative external drive called "One Touch" that automatically backs up your data when you press a button. Although we haven't yet tested this drive firsthand, it looks like a nice approach to making backups as convenient as possible. After we have an opportunity to test One Touch, we'll let you know what we think of it in the next issue of Computing News.
CD backups. If you have Windows XP or Mac OS and a CD burner, backing up folders and files is as easy as dragging them onto the CD drive. CD burning capabilities vary across operating systems:
Mac OS: On Mac OS, you cannot add more files to a CD after you've burned it. However, Mac OS does support multiple burning sessions through its Disk Utility or the commercial software called Toast. Neither of these methods is convenient to use, but CD-RW disks can be easily reformatted and reused even on Mac OS without any special procedures.
Windows: Windows XP allows you to add files until you reach the capacity of the disk. Earlier versions of Windows require a separate piece of software for burning CDs (usually included with a new CD burner). If you're running a version earlier than XP, you might want to try the free CD-burning software "burnatonce," available at http://burnatonce.com/
DVDs: If your operating system has DVD writing capability, you may want to back up your files on DVDs, as they hold about six times as much information as a typical CD-R.
Thumb drives. If all you're really worried about backing up are comparatively small files such as correspondence and the like, you may just want to use a removable storage device such as a thumb drive. (This assumes that in case of a complete drive failure, you'd just reinstall the system and applications from original media.)
USB Flash Drives are a good mechanism to store files and folders--they have the same ease of use as floppy disks but they have more storage capacity and they're less prone to failure. Cost for a 16MB thumb drive is only $15 through the Computing Center hardware repair shop ("E-Shop") in 151 McKenzie Hall. 16MB is enough capacity to store about ten floppy disks' worth of information. The E-Shop also stocks other sizes of thumb drives, with capacities of up to 512MB.
Creative solutions for small files: These would include keeping a backup copy on one of our timesharing hosts (Darkwing, Oregon) or emailing an important document to yourself. The only problem with these methods is the file size limit for email (5MB) or the storage capacity of your account (100MB by default).
A mirrored PC coupled with regular backups to an external disk will go a long way toward protecting your data, but the main idea is to have your important data in a minimum of two places.
We're sure there are other methods of backup we haven't mentioned here, and any method that works for you is a good one. Just be sure you use something!