Hard Drive Failure - It does happen

[Peter Rush]

So one of my editing drives failed catastrophically today - from 100% health to a gazillion bad sectors and system file errors. I noticed something was wrong when yesterday's wedding took 20 minutes to load into premiere when normally it takes about 10 seconds.

Long and short of it is the drive is kaput and I cannot get any files off it. A good reminder of how important backups are. I have only shot 4 weddings so far this year and they were all on that drive.

Apart from the time spend re-copying the files and the expense of a new drive (about £100) no drama

Pete

[Craig McKenna]

No drama! That's the best thing that can come out of something like this...

I have back ups of mine, though I would lose any current edits (changes - not footage / audio) under my current working system.

I'm going to be running a RAID 5 once I can afford a large one that runs with Thunderbolt 2.

Definitely shows how important they are though!

Good win under your belt there, Pete! :D

[Anthony McErlean]

Originally Posted by Peter Rush

Long and short of it is the drive is kaput and I cannot get any files off it.

Sorry to hear that Peter but glad to hear you have the original files.
I've had 2 WD blacks go on me but got them replaced under warranty.

With one of them, out of the blue for some reason, three of my wedding project folders went missing.

I disconnected the drive and inserted it into a caddy, powered up the PC again, it then wanted to scan the drive and after that, the missing folders were back.

Glad you got sorted.

[Peter Rush]

This was a Seagate Barracuda - about 3 years old - I have a few of them and this is the first I've had an issue with

[Anthony McErlean]

Originally Posted by Peter Rush

This was a Seagate Barracuda

My Barracuda 's are OK, so far, it was the WD Blacks that let me down.

[Noa Put]

Aha, so it was the drive :) we had 5 drive failures over the past 10 years, 4 where all seagates that where used in my wife's pc, one was a 1tb wd black from my edit station.

[Clive McLaughlin]

I've had one of my archive drives fail. way less of a worry than any of my main drives as all these weddings have long ago been sent to the client. There's another good copy of it still anyway. STill though, I never like a drive failing. It's just incredibly disconcerting!

Whats the advice on drive lifetime? Should you buy fresh every 3/4 years just to be safe?

I've always gone from a mix of using sync software to manually backing up. The sync software quite often will run into issues where some key data files go missing and so the automated sync no longer works. I've about given up on that.

I've three copies of work I've not yet done. (although i rarely backup project files as I edit which I prob should).
Then once a client has had there work for a few months it gets moved to the archive. Then on no fixed date, if I need room I delete old raw footage off the archive. But I've got the rendered videos of every wedding I've ever done just in case they come back to me in a panic - I can be their angel!

[Noa Put]

Whats the advice on drive lifetime? Should you buy fresh every 3/4 years just to be safe?

The wd disc that failed in my case was a edit disc and that one gets a lot of usage so they are probably more prone to failure if used extensively. I noticed that something was wrong when I started to get errors in Edius about missing videodata and some of the data on that particular disc was then effectively gone or inaccessible, when I then restarted my pc I got a disc check message and windows automatically started to repair secors from that failing disc. After a restart all was fine again but just for a short while and I again got errors. I eventually copied the entire project to another disc but even that copy process was very slow so it was clear the disc started to fail.

I don't replace my discs unless I start to get errors, I have a good backup system in place that can save me from most HD disasters :)

[Arthur Gannis]

Over the years I had WD as well as Seagate drives failing a lot and switched to Toshiba ones. Never a problem with them and most of them are over 6 years. Backup, backup, backup.

[Craig McKenna]

Surely the best way to remain OK in the event of a hard disk drive failure is to have all drives running as RAID 5s? I know it's an expensive solution, but you can get 1TB for £100 at incredible speeds using Thunderbolt 2, whilst you can get 1 TB for around £50 if you buy a server running in RAID 5. Any drive goes down, hot swap, and carry on as you are...

Anyone against this?

[Peter Rush]

I have no budget left this year having just bought my A7s II and Atomos Ninja and a couple of CFast cards (Ouch - how much???)

My PC has 2 X 3TB editing drives (as well as a 2TB system drive) that are 7200rpm (and need to be for Premiere Pro) and I have a collection of 2 X 3TB and 2 X 4TB backup drives. To replace all these with RAID and Thunderbolt 2 would be pretty expensive - nice idea though

P

[Daniel James]

Originally Posted by Craig McKenna

Surely the best way to remain OK in the event of a hard disk drive failure is to have all drives running as RAID 5s? I know it's an expensive solution, but you can get 1TB for £100 at incredible speeds using Thunderbolt 2, whilst you can get 1 TB for around £50 if you buy a server running in RAID 5. Any drive goes down, hot swap, and carry on as you are...

Anyone against this?

Yes.. Raid 5 is slow to work from, its not designed for fast access of video files, backups are easy. I use Syncback Pro which handles backups, and it runs every hour on my editing machine, syncing changed files to a NAS. (Realistically once the backup of the media is done, you only really have to backup the project file in premiere pro). I don't bother backing up the cfa/pek files as they are created by premiere when the project is first opened on a machine. Syncback has the advantage that you can also create folder names using variables such as date or time, so I have one job which takes an hourly snapshot of project files (not source footage) and another that syncs the whole disk onto my nas.

I have also found this little drive invaluable: its a battery powered portable hard disk, that has a built in sd card reader, you can either control it from a smartphone or tablet, or set it to automatically back up any sd card you push into it. very useful for backups on the road, it also means all my footage is ready to go on a hard disc by the time I get back to the office.

My Passport Wireless - Wi-Fi Mobile Storage

[Craig McKenna]

Originally Posted by Peter Rush

I have no budget left this year having just bought my A7s II and Atomos Ninja and a couple of CFast cards (Ouch - how much???)

My PC has 2 X 3TB editing drives (as well as a 2TB system drive) that are 7200rpm (and need to be for Premiere Pro) and I have a collection of 2 X 3TB and 2 X 4TB backup drives. To replace all these with RAID and Thunderbolt 2 would be pretty expensive - nice idea though

P

How's the Atomos Ninja? Do you have to record with much larger file sizes?

Yeah, pretty much. I am thinking for this year's investment (end of the year), to get the G RAID Studio XL 32TB with a new iMac 5K maxed out. I realise it's a huge investment, but it's also a great fail safe and move for the future. With a gimbal thrown in, 2017 will be pretty sorted.

Originally Posted by Daniel James

Yes.. Raid 5 is slow to work from, its not designed for fast access of video files, backups are easy. I use Syncback Pro which handles backups, and it runs every hour on my editing machine, syncing changed files to a NAS. (Realistically once the backup of the media is done, you only really have to backup the project file in premiere pro). I don't bother backing up the cfa/pek files as they are created by premiere when the project is first opened on a machine. Syncback has the advantage that you can also create folder names using variables such as date or time, so I have one job which takes an hourly snapshot of project files (not source footage) and another that syncs the whole disk onto my nas.

I have also found this little drive invaluable: its a battery powered portable hard disk, that has a built in sd card reader, you can either control it from a smartphone or tablet, or set it to automatically back up any sd card you push into it. very useful for backups on the road, it also means all my footage is ready to go on a hard disc by the time I get back to the office.

My Passport Wireless - Wi-Fi Mobile Storage

That's awesome!!! Have you heard of the drive corrupting any cards? That's my biggest worry. Otherwise, for moments when you are available to do a back up, that's awesome! From what I've just read though, it seems as though transfer rates are quite slow?

As for the NAS back up - that's great too. Massively cost-effective as well. My NAS could be used in the same way, and I might look into doing that. Thanks!

RAID 5 is actually rapid via Thunderbolt 2 with 8 drives. You're still looking at stunning speeds, which is why I'm considering a huge investment into it over buying a set of smaller drives. In effect, you can have peace of mind over your editing station as well as your NAS. I realise it may be OTT, but it's also 'almost' as good as RAID 0 depending on the controller (from what I've read and understand), which makes the transition from a RAID 0 drive (which I currently use) quite appealing. Especially as I'll be jumping from Thunderbolt 1 to Thunderbolt 2, with more drives and much greater speeds for 4K edits (further down the line, as well as for ceremony and speeches currently).

[Peter Rush]

Craig I use the Atomos purely for backup purposes - with my old EA50 I could record dual onto SD card and Flash Drive but only recording onto one card with the A7s makes me nervous so for the ceremony and speeches I use the Ninja Star as backup. It would be nice to have it for all day but the extra weight/bulk/cable would be a hindrance - plus the prohibitive cost of CFast cards

[Craig McKenna]

Originally Posted by Peter Rush

Craig I use the Atomos purely for backup purposes - with my old EA50 I could record dual onto SD card and Flash Drive but only recording onto one card with the A7s makes me nervous so for the ceremony and speeches I use the Ninja Star as backup. It would be nice to have it for all day but the extra weight/bulk/cable would be a hindrance - plus the prohibitive cost of CFast cards

Thanks Pete. I like the idea of doing this, but like you, I am also at the end of my budget for this year... if I hooked up the Atomos to a GH3, would I be able to get unlimited time recording, or would it still end on 30 minutes?