External Hard Drives

We have seen a number of external hard drives fail in the department over the past several months. It is obvious that the reliability of external drives is considerably less than internal drives. This problem is not unique to us - I've read dozens of technical articles discussing wide-spread external drive failures. I believe that two factors greatly contribute to external drive failures - heat and shock. Most external drive enclosures do not have cooling fans and many, especially low-end or "entry level" devices, are housed in plastic cases with inadequate ventilation an very little metal for heat transfer/dissipation. Heat can damage the interface electronics, which is an easy repair, or damage the drive itself - an impossible and/or very expensive repair/recovery. Shock (vibration) is a problem in external drives because they are moved around and sit on a desk in a small enclosure and are easily bumped, knocked over, etc. This can cause physical damage to the drive if it occurs during a read or write operation.Personal experience yesterday - A few months ago I became concerned about the reliability of an external drive at home which housed about 300Gb of digital photos, scanned photos, and video. I bought a large secondary internal drive for my home desktop and transferred everything from the external to the secondary internal but continued to use the external drive for backups. Yesterday, the external drive failed. I knew when it started up and sounded like a coffee grinder it was gone. Fortunately, years of family photos and movies were saved on the internal drive.I know some of you use external drives for primary storage. I strongly suggest that you do so with caution and with the knowledge that you could suffer a unrecoverable loss. I don't mean to instill panic, just sharing the fact that no storage device or media gives you 100% assurance that your data is safe. If you use an external drive for anything do the following:

Make sure there is plenty of room around the enclosure to ensure adequate ventilation. Feel it occasionally so you will know how warm it normally operates. If it suddenly feels unusually hot, turn it off an call us.
Select a location for the drive on your desk that is out of the way, behind your monitor for example, where it is less likely to get bumped, knocked over, or worse, knocked to the floor.

Turn it off when not in use. If you use it only for backups, turn it on to make your backup then turn it off again.

If you hear any odd noise at all from the drive, excessive chattering, clicking, humming, etc. turn it off right away and call us.

If you use and external drive for primary storage, make a backup of your most important data. Depending on how much data you need to backup, use a flash drive (available up to 64Gb now), CD, DVD, or "M" Drive. You can also take advantage of the network backup options ARE-IT provides - contact us for details if you are not familiar with network backup.