Troubleshooting Hard Drives - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 Prof Messer
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When would it be a good idea to use a RAID 0? If you are always faced with total failure, what's the point?
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@mary said in Troubleshooting Hard Drives - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 Prof Messer:
When would it be a good idea to use a RAID 0? If you are always faced with total failure, what's the point?
When the data doesn't matter, but speed does. It used to be popular with video game systems, for example, where load time mattered a lot, but it was easy to install again should the data be lost.
RAID 0 is common in caching systems where data needs to be stored temporarily, but never matters. Basically, anytime that you'd be okay using just a single disk, you might be okay using RAID 0. If you think about it, if you have only a single disk and anything fails, all is lost. That's how your desktop is, for example. So if you are already okay with that risk, you might be okay with double the risk but twice the speed and capacity, too.
It's for "ephemeral" storage.
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Is there a way to fix the physical hard drive?
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@connorsoliver said in Troubleshooting Hard Drives - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 Prof Messer:
Is there a way to fix the physical hard drive?
There is but there really isnt any situations where you would do that unless you had to recover data. If a physical hard drive becomes damage, you generally cannot trust the drive anymore and dispose of it.
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@connorsoliver said in Troubleshooting Hard Drives - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 Prof Messer:
Is there a way to fix the physical hard drive?
Kind of.
All Seagate F3 firmware drives (most of the drives in the last 10+ years) have a known firmware bug. Seagate won't fix it but instead started their own data recovery company. You can fix the firmware if you have a PC3K from AceLabs. It will set you back about 10K. It's easier just not to buy Seagate.
You can do head swaps in hard drives but this is ONLY to get the data off.
It's not cost effective to try to fix a bad drive (nor is it practical)
I have the gear to do it (Deepspar, PC3K, Clean Room, etc.) since I do data recovery on bad hard drives, but as @IRJ said you fix it just to the point where you can get data off it, but not to keep using it.
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@IRJ said in Troubleshooting Hard Drives - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 Prof Messer:
@connorsoliver said in Troubleshooting Hard Drives - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 Prof Messer:
Is there a way to fix the physical hard drive?
There is but there really isnt any situations where you would do that unless you had to recover data. If a physical hard drive becomes damage, you generally cannot trust the drive anymore and dispose of it.
Plus they are cheap (relatively) and even if you could repair it and trust it, it's a costly and difficult thing to do to repair a drive when it is effectively cheap and easy to just buy a new one.
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Very interesting, I remember I've heard that sometimes to fix a hard drive that is damaged you can put it inside of a freezer with bags of course and it can be fixed, is that true or is a myth or a lie? Sorry about foolish question. xD
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@brianwinkelmann said in Troubleshooting Hard Drives - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 Prof Messer:
Very interesting, I remember I've heard that sometimes to fix a hard drive that is damaged you can put it inside of a freezer with bags of course and it can be fixed, is that true or is a myth or a lie? Sorry about foolish question. xD
Well, it's not true. What is true is that once in a while a bad hard drive can be made to keep spinning, for a few minutes, until it warms up, by doing this. It doesn't fix the drive in any way, and in fact, will hasten it's complete demise. But in some cases, it will give you a small window in which to spin up the drive and recover some data from it. But it makes the chances of more complete data loss even higher.
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@brianwinkelmann said in Troubleshooting Hard Drives - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 Prof Messer:
Very interesting, I remember I've heard that sometimes to fix a hard drive that is damaged you can put it inside of a freezer with bags of course and it can be fixed, is that true or is a myth or a lie? Sorry about foolish question. xD
Not a foolish question Brian. We have some customers who have done it. The drives (other than the brand new high capacity helium drives) are not air tight. They have a filter. So moisture can get it and start to corrode the platters.
If it has been in the freezer, we have to charge extra as it has to be cleaned with a special cleaning solvent that is about $400-500 per gallon.
Also it can cause a drive that may have been a logical or a physical non invasive recovery instantly into a clean room job (the most expensive option). So it's best to do nothing to fix it. Bring it to a quality data recovery company (like mine!) and they will have the best chance of recovering the data.
