My Foray Into Data Recovery

I’ve been growing increasingly concerned with the quality of hard drives being made today. It used to be that a hard drive would last you many years before you’d see a failure out of it. In fact, I still have hard drives that date back to the early 90’s that continue to work to this day. I can’t say the same for more recent drives, especially those that have been made in the last year or two, as I’ve just been constantly dealing with failed hard drives on my machines. I’ll preface my most recent experience with a little history first.

The Preface

I recently upgraded my raid machine, which is simply a low-power PC in a large case with four hard drives in it all set up as a Linux software RAID-5 array. Previously, I had used four 160GB IDE drives hooked up in the machine using a PCI controller card. That was fine for storage a few years ago when I built it, but recently I’ve managed to fill the thing, so it was clearly time for an upgrade. Considering that the entire array was less than a single 500GB drive, it’s not too surprising.

My plan was to buy four 500GB drives and increase the array to 1.5TB, but before the planned migration, I decided to buy a new 500GB drive on which to back up the current array. Sure I could have replaced the drives one by one, rebuilding the array each time and expending the partition when I was all done, but the machine was never quite set up the way I wanted it to be, and since I wanted to switch from IDE to SATA, I would have had a lot of tweaking to do. I also wasn’t sure how far I was stretching the PSU in the machine, because while it was running a low power VIA CPU, it was still powering five hard drives (the array and the main system drive). Backing everything up to another drive and starting a new array from scratch just made more sense, so that’s exactly what I did.