Even after being careful, I've lost some precious data this week. While life is inevitably only complete with the occasional hardship, all geeks feel a special kind of pain reflex at the idea of losing a hard drive. We fool ourselves into thinking our digital selves are invincible, but aren't we always just one good EMP blast away from a construction job?
My photography data takes up more than twice the drive capacity of my MacBook Pro. In an effort to minimize my risk factor, I bought a redundant external drive to hold everything dearest to me. I’d previously used a Maxtor OneTouch III 750GB, so I decided to step up my game and order the sister product, the Maxtor OneTouch III 1.5TB. This is a two drive managed RAID array marketed to Mac types, plus people doing digital media. I was excited to be able to buy a brand new unit on eBay for under $500; it would allow me to set up RAID 1 mirroring. If one drive goes down, the other has a perfect copy, right?
Don’t buy the Maxtor OneTouch III 1.5TB
Right out of the plastic, I was lied to. It turns out that RAID mirroring isn’t supported under OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Except, they don’t tell you that, and it’s not in their knowledge base. I had to get a customer service drone on the line to confirm what I suspected: 10.4 or the highway, because the administration tool for the OneTouch III — which lets you set RAID level, set passwords, sleep timeouts, and assign actions to the big button on the front — couldn’t see the drive under Leopard, which came out over a year ago in 2007.
Presumably I was supposed to just give up, but I attempted to run the admin inside of a Windows XP virtual machine courtesy of Parallels, mount it via USB, and enable RAID 1 mirroring. Back in OS X, I then wiped the drive and formatted it as HFS+ (aka Macintosh Journaled)… and I succeeded! But then I had a terrible thought. What if, when I formatted as HFS+, I had undone whatever voodoo setting enabled the RAID 1 and I was actually running with just one 750GB drive, thinking that I had a mirror when I didn’t? The device shows up as one unit, so I could never know for sure until it might be too late. Plus Murphy’s Law is that if something bad can happen, it will happen.
If you open the drive casing — even to do data recovery — then you are voiding your warranty. Seagate Recovery Services wouldn’t even commit to the idea that them doing recovery on their own drive wasn’t a violation of their warranty. If your drive fails, ship them your defective drive with all of your data and they will be happy to send you a new, empty drive and throw your old drive into an industrial grinder. In other words, you’re set up to fail no matter what happens.
So after spending a day configuring RAID 1, I realized the truth - that I had just bought a 1.5TB partition, and doubled the rate of mechanical failure. Oops.
My drive failed, and so I ran Disk Warrior on it over-night. It’s too early to say that this was a mistake, but there’s an excellent chance that I made a huge problem worse as Disk Warrior just keeps hammering away at a sector until it either works or presumably starts a friction fire. Why is this a problem, specifically?
Surprise! If it’s not RAID 1 mirrored, it’s a RAID 0 striped set.
Striped sets are incredibly hard to restore from, and an “Invalid Node Structure” (roughly equivalent to a corrupted File Allocation Table for all you Windows users) which would normally be easy to fix, is suddenly this complex logistics issue because the data is split between two drives. They say striping optimizes for speed. I say striping optimizes for pain, failure, and existential rage.
Seagate Recovery Services quote: $2900
To say that these people can go fuck themselves is a huge understatement. Seagate owns Maxtor, and this drive was in plastic six weeks ago — it has six months of warranty left. That's $1450 per 1.5TB drive, even though the guy I spoke to described it as "an easy fix". Presumably Seagate-approved blank drives to copy to would be extra. With taxes that's over $3500. Add in the price of the original drive and I would be paying over $4000 — not to mention lost days of work and stress — to get back what I had a month ago, before I decided to back up my data.
The current plan is to go with my gut and trust a basement operator, literally: Accurate Data Recovery is a home-based business run by a husband and wife team who instead of a rec-room have a full clean room facility with five dudes in it every day. They are the very definition of old school computer nerds, and on sheer principle I’d rather trust my most precious digital assets to people who have been doing this since I was born and don’t realize how quaint a notion it is when an otherwise plain looking house on a quiet street North of Pape and Danforth has a full-service data recovery lab downstairs. It’s something Cory Doctorow would approve of, and with a projected budget of $700-1200, I’m almost excited to pay. Even on a hangover day, these folks are going to care more than the Troglodytes at some corporate lab.
To my complete horror, refurbished units are currently on eBay for roughly $250. First of all, anyone that trusts their data to something that someone else has declared broken is a fool’s fool. However, for the price point I could see someone acting on this amazing opportunity to own a perfectly good back-up drive, cheap. Like I said, it’s marketed in Apple stores and photography stores like B&H, to Apple users; Maxtor is being intellectually dishonest with its customers, and they should be slapped.
For the love of whatever God you believe in, never used a striped RAID set to back up your critical data. The goal is twice as many copies, not half as many copies.
Dear Reddit,
It has been a long time, my harsh mistress. Yet I can always trust your selfless collective wisdom, offered without my ever having to ask for it — even while I sleep. Your optimism with regards to my plight warms my cockles. Sadly I haven’t heard from you since you trashed my Endless Pageless article as unoriginal, over a full calendar year after it was first posted. Was it something I said? Did I change?
I like to believe that the reason you noticed me today is that I took great care to write a warning to fellow Leopard users about a product which is marketed to deceive us by an enemy which refuses to publicly acknowledge its own lies of omission. It’s likely that a personal rant would have simply been lost in a sea of similar woes; I wanted to post a hobo glyph warning other Stupid Mac People that this product is not as it seems.
That said, I suspect that the reason you don’t see many Apple fans judging Linux/Windows fans is that as BSD fans, we’re just not jealous of you. Pragmatically, if you show me a laptop which runs TextMate and Aperture while not looking like it was designed by a financial portfolio manager, then I’ll see you on #ubuntu. We can debate the relative merits of source vs. binary package managers, or something.
There are a few details which I omitted from my post which might clear up some of your misunderstandings. Perhaps they can draw us together, and things can be like they used to be… before everything got so complicated. A man can dream, can’t he?
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I burned in the 1.5TB drive for a full month with my old 750GB intact. The drive failed almost exactly 10 minutes after I offered the old drive to a co-worker, leading me to invoking Murphy’s Law by name. Yes, I got caught with my pants down, and there should not have been a moment where I didn’t have two copies. Mea culpa.
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The two choices offered to me by the Windows-based configuration tool were “Large Partition” and “Mirrored” (or something very close to that). It really didn’t feel like I was choosing between RAID 0 and 1, so much as “mirrored or not mirrored”. It’s my fault for not calling the Hard Drive Selection Consulting Company as Joe C. pointed out. Sorry Joe, I was waay out of line.
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Addressing the two drives inside independently is not provided as an option. It looks like one device, no matter what you do.
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Drobo was already being discussed before this post went up, and is what I’m pushing for. Thanks for the recommendation!
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RAID is not a backup; it’s just marketed as a backup. Okay, I get it. Don’t buy this drive if you use Leopard.
Let’s not let time and distance separate us again, okay?
Call me.
Love, Pete
p.s. This is my current photography project, if you’re wondering what I’m doing without you in my life. It will really take you back.