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Automation hard drive life expectancy

B

bossbill

Now that most of us are using Windows-based automation systems, and many are using the hard drive for music, what effects are we seeing on life expectancy?
 
Bill Wolfenbarger said:
what effects are we seeing on life expectancy?
Click to expand...

life of the hard drive... or life of the station owner? ;D

I don't follow all the computer technical publications like I once did but I was always amused by the writers who each had their favorite brand of hard drive which they considered divine, and had their least favorite brand of hard drive which they considered to be satanic... or at least failure prone.

My unscientific, casual operation is that like so many products, hard drives... like automobiles.... look more alike than they used to, perform more alike than they used to, and hopefully, fail less than they used to.

Are your automation machines using the same types of hard drives found in desktop PCs... or are your automation machines using the same types of hard drives found in server rooms and data centers? The folklore is that server-grade drives (1) last longer (2) hopefully give some kind of warning signs before catastrophic, all-out failure.
 
Knock on wood, I have never had a audio storage drive fail in our systems. We have triple-redundancy, just in case, but we've never had a data drive failure.

We've had one system drive fail and it failed within 6 months of being placed in service. Samsung SATA drive. All of our other drives are Seagates or Western Digital white-box varieties. Some have been in use 7+ years 24/7.

We have had Dell workstations fail because of the bad Chinese capacitors on the motherboards. But 7 years 24/7 operation that is not bad.
 
As a general rule I replace them every 18-24 months. With the price of a hard drive these days, why wait for it to fail. Remove the old one with your music library on it and put it in a safe place. Should all hell break loose, you at least have a backup with a bulk of your database on it.

Of course, unless your studios burn down you shouldn't ever need the "in case of emergency, break glass and use hard drive" option. You can have RAID running, an external HD to back everything up to and even a PC at the transmitter site as an off site backup with everything ready to roll on it. There's also options such as Carbonite which aren't very expensive.

Hard drives are cheap. The labor to reload your entire library isn't. Don't wait for them to fail, and have multiple layers of backup. There's no reason not to when you can get 1TB of storage for under $100. Even the cheapest station owner will understand the consequences of not spending the $100 if you 'splain how long it will take to reload everything and how much revenue will be lost from missed spots.
 
I replace every 5 years, but I keep them backed up every month. I had one PC blow up due to lighning. Sure was handy having a cloned drive with current backups. Total system downtime was about 2 hours.
 
All my machines use two Western Digital HDs, one for system files and the other for audio. The system files HD lasts much longer than the audio HD. We're seeing about 4 years from the audio HD and longer for the system HD. Our HD are the enterprise type, not the consumer type.
 
Thanks for the input. We have four stations on iMediaTouch, with the audio on a server, and the server has backup, also the audio is on the studio drives. But I've now had one Seagate drive fail after two years in an on-air machine, and a couple now are getting noisy after just over three years.

These are Seagate Barracuda 500 gb drives.
 
Seagate & Western Digital are the big boys, and both make some very good drives, and both make some real junk. The hard part is telling the difference. I don't even trust a particular product line to be consistent from top to bottom. Google the specific model number and you'll find real variance in drives within a product line.

With the cost of drives, I'd never go more than 3 years on a drive. Mirroring is an excellent option, but that won't prevent catastrophic failure in case of a lightning strike, surge, or power supply snafu. Cloning is the best option, and software like Clonezilla is free, but requires you to take the server down. There are others that can create an image while the server is operating. Windows 7 can create an image right from the backup program.

One thing to remember about external drives is that most are really not designed for 24/7/365 operation. The power supply and cooling capabilities can be compromised much too easily. In my experience, 2 years in nominal lifetime on most external drives. SAN drives are a different animal, which is why they're much more expensive.

Server drives do tend to last longer than typical desktop drives. The hardest thing for solid state electronics to deal with are temperature changes that affect expansion-contraction of multilayer boards, and power surges. Systems that never shut down deal with the fewest events that create those conditions.
 
I've found the Western Digital enterprise grade HDs to be very good. That's all we use. Someone else made this point, but I do notice that the machines that rarely reboot or shut down (on-air as an example) do last much longer. The constant reboots and especially the cold starts really take a toll on drives after awhile.
 
WNTIRadio said:
As a general rule I replace them every 18-24 months. With the price of a hard drive these days, why wait for it to fail. Remove the old one with your music library on it and put it in a safe place. Should all hell break loose, you at least have a backup with a bulk of your database on it.

Of course, unless your studios burn down you shouldn't ever need the "in case of emergency, break glass and use hard drive" option. You can have RAID running, an external HD to back everything up to and even a PC at the transmitter site as an off site backup with everything ready to roll on it. There's also options such as Carbonite which aren't very expensive.

Hard drives are cheap. The labor to reload your entire library isn't. Don't wait for them to fail, and have multiple layers of backup. There's no reason not to when you can get 1TB of storage for under $100. Even the cheapest station owner will understand the consequences of not spending the $100 if you 'splain how long it will take to reload everything and how much revenue will be lost from missed spots.
Click to expand...

That isn't true at the moment. Hard drives are really expensive right now. The 5 drives I bought for 79.99 each two weeks ago are selling for 219.99 right now.
 
That's what I'm discovering this afternoon. Why are prices way up at the moment???
 
WNTIRadio said:
Of course, unless your studios burn down you shouldn't ever need the "in case of emergency, break glass and use hard drive" option.
Click to expand...

I always kept a clone drive at home. Fortunately, never needed the off-site clone.
 
Bill Wolfenbarger said:
That's what I'm discovering this afternoon. Why are prices way up at the moment???
Click to expand...

Looks like there may be a supply shortage. I looked for the WD HDs everywhere online and all suppliers seem to be out-of-stock.
 
Apparently lots of hard drives are manufactured in Thailand, which has suffered record floods this fall. Blame Just-in-Time production for the price spike...
 
For what it is worth,

I use Western Digital Caviar BLACK (never Green... Those have tons of troubles).

I use Western Digital Raptors for servers.
 
I just ordered a Caviar Black. They also have a five-year warranty. I've also decided to standardize on 500 gb drives for the on-air systems, even though the OS drive was only 80. The smaller drives are not as inexpensive and easy to find anymore.
 
I went back to the college station that I cut my radio teeth on back around 2001-03.

The custom-built automation computer built by the engineer in 2003 has had the motherboard upgraded to a dual-core Intel back about a year and a half ago. The dual 40 GB drives had all the music transferred to a 250GB Nextor portable HD. The originals still run the PC, however.

This is impressive considering inexperienced DJs, an open internet connection, and 24/7 use since 2005 (the station stream broadcasts 24/7, the FM station simulcasts a NPR station for 16-20 hrs./day.)

I need to throw this out too under the Scott Studios vein of things: The second station I worked at just replaced their vintage-1996 system in 2009 that originally came from WPTE/Virginia Beach. 13 years of (somewhat) trouble-free operation! only ONE HD failure!

Radio-X
 
From the research I've done over the past 24 hours, it appears that Seagate had a bad run of Barracuda SATA drives about the time our HP computers were built. If they were automobiles, we'd be protected by the 'lemon law'.
 
Bill Wolfenbarger said:
From the research I've done over the past 24 hours, it appears that Seagate had a bad run of Barracuda SATA drives about the time our HP computers were built. If they were automobiles, we'd be protected by the 'lemon law'.
Click to expand...

I have bought two bad runs in my life... 10 IBM DeathStar's... 10 Seagate 750 GB (can't recall brand). The DeathStar's were the worst. I would RMA, get another, a month or so later, hear that damn grinding sound, RMA, get another. I was finally allowed to replace them. The Seagates really surprised me. I replaced them with WD drives and RMA'd all of the Seagates. All of the replacement drives eventually found use and have been very reliable.

I have and will NEVER buy another IBM (now Hitachi) drive. I stick to WD.
 
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