Broken Hard Disc: What Next?

[Dunx]

I had a very, very nasty shock the other evening when I got back from work - the hard disc on my main PC (azathoth) had stopped working. It wasn't being recognised by the IDE controller, instead just sitting there making "spang, spang" noises. Everything else was recognised on boot, from the IDE CDROM to the two SCSI devices (a scanner and a CDR).

"Blast", I thought, or words to that effect.

Fortunately, I had only been using this machine full time for a few weeks so although I hadn't done a backup in that time (fool that I am) I hadn't lost anything very much important. The question I have now is what I should do next (aside from taking the disc back to the shop I bought it at and remonstrating forcefully).

My thinking at the moment is that I'll replace the single 40Gb hard disc with two 20Gb ones so I can do replication for day to day backups, then sort out some regularly running cron job to write stuff out to CDR weekly.

Any other ideas?

As an addendum, I should mention that the disc did boot the following day. Obviously I don't trust it any more, but at least I can get my data off it and can at least replicate stuff off there onto a secondary disc rather than having to reinstall everything from scratch.

[PaulKroll]

If you want to do the two-drive route, why not go all the way and get a RAID ide card? Most of the cheaper (about $100) cards do RAID 0, 1, or 0+1. I think 1 is the "Duplicate data on both drives" one, which would give you "constant replication"

Although you mentioned a cron job, and if you're running Linux (and, I'd bet, most other Unix-like critters), you have in-kernel RAID options which would be cheaper than the extra card. :)

You know you'll pay a lot more for those two 20 gigs than for a single 40, yes? Maxtor 20 gigs are going for $99 (5400 rpm, 7200 is +$10) at CompUSA, and 40 gig 7200 RPM Maxtors are $149. Well, ok $50 isn't a >LOT< but... it's a high percentage. :)

[Dunx]

Although you mentioned a cron job, and if you're running Linux (and, I'd bet, most other Unix-like critters), you have in-kernel RAID options which would be cheaper than the extra card. :)

That's a good idea - I'll investigate that.

Yes, I am indeed running Linux; SuSE 7.1 on azathoth, SuSE 6.4 on dagon, the laptop which I'm using while azathoth is ill.

You know you'll pay a lot more for those two 20 gigs than for a single 40, yes? Maxtor 20 gigs are going for $99 (5400 rpm, 7200 is +$10) at CompUSA, and 40 gig 7200 RPM Maxtors are $149. Well, ok $50 isn't a >LOT< but... it's a high percentage. :)

I appreciate the thought, but I got burned last time by trying to save money: the HD which crashed is a 40Gb 5400 Maxtor which was on special at $100. If my machine is less likely to crash catastrophically, I think I'll stump up the extra $100 this time!