Can an external drive fail?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom.
Here for Askleo.com where?
I try and give you more confidence
and take away some of that fear when it comes to technology.
Here's today's question.
I've had two external hard drives fail in the last few months.
One was an older drive that required
external power in addition to a USB connection.
The other was a newer, smaller one,
just a year old, which was connected via USB alone.
Is this kind of failure common?
How do I make sure all my data is not at risk if I dispose of these?
And will the new, larger capacity USB flash drives work as well for backups?
I'm not really sure what you mean by this
kind of failure, but honestly, it's irrelevant.
Absolutely.
Hard drives fail and external hard drives are no different.
In fact, external hard drives might be at ever so slightly more risk for failure
simply because they often get manhandled, I'll call it.
We tend to abuse them a little bit more
than the hard drives that are installed in our desktop and laptop computers.
Often that's offset by them being
different drives designed for that kind of usage.
A little slower, a little bit more rugged, but nonetheless, they are hard drives.
Hard drives can fail without warning.
You need to be prepared.
Whether they be internal, external,
randomly, and without warning, they can fail.
The only thing you could do honestly, prepare, and you already know what I'm
going to say when it comes to preparing for failure.
The only way to make sure that you can
handle failure without it being a disaster is to backup.
If data exists in only one place, it's not backed up.
So if you have data on a hard drive, be it internal or external,
and it's only on that hard drive, then it's not backed up.
If that hard drive's failure would be
a disaster to you, the data is not backed up.
The solution, like I said, back it up.
Come up with an appropriate backup regimen that works for you,
ideally automated to ensure that any data you care about anything is automatically
and ideally replicated in at least two, maybe more places to ensure that no matter
what happens to your drives, like I said, internal or external, you're covered.
Now, disposing of those drives is
an interesting problem because by definition it's failed.
But there are two things you can do.
One is for external drives in particular, it's not terribly uncommon for it not
to be the drive at fault, but rather the interface.
So one of the things you might be able to do is actually remove the hard drive
from the external drive enclosure and either put it into a new enclosure
and maybe start using it, or get a temporary cable.
There are cables that basically act as USB two SATA or other interface that you can
then use to copy off the data or more importantly, wipe the drive.
Because ultimately,
if you're going to dispose of a drive that you'd no longer trust,
you want to make sure to wipe the data off the drive if you can.
But like I said, we're kind of in a chicken and egg
situation here because the drive has failed.
Now, if it's actually the drive that has failed and you are unable to access it or
erase it, then, well, we need to get a little bit more hardcore.
What I've done in the past and I kind of sort of recommend physical destruction.
I've taken a drill and drilled holes through external hard drives or through
hard drives that I could not read or write to.
That way the chances of anything being ever recoverable from that are minuscule.
They're not zero, as it turns out.
I mean, if you are a highly motivated
large company or government and you want to try and extract some of the data
from your damaged hard drive, they might be able to do it.
But for typical use,
as long as you drill a hole all the way through the case and to make sure to hit
the platters in the disk, that ought to do it.
Now, USB flash drives are interesting.
They've gotten better over time, absolutely.
However,
I don't recommend them for long term storage, mostly because most of the USB
flash drives that we use these days are relatively inexpensive.
Or to put it more colloquially, they're cheap.
And I mean that both in terms of cost and construction.
The components used aren't necessarily
the highest quality, like the kind you might find in an SSD.
SSDs are still flash memory,
but there's a different technology that in theory is more resilient.
What we don't know about USB flash drives
is just how long they'll hold on to the data.
We have a much better sense for magnetic
hard drives and that they will hold data for a long period of time.
Also, USB flash drives, they can be slower.
I know that they're faster reading, but again, depending on the kind
of technology that's being used, they can actually be slower writing this
is nothing new, so my preference remains that for backup
and for archival, you really want old school magnetic
spinning disk platter hard drives for that data.
And you want more than one because the rule I started with still holds.
If it's in only one place, it's not backed up.
And that means that if something happens to that only one place, your data is gone.
Make sure you have multiple copies
in multiple places and you should be good for comments, for updates,
for links related to this topic and more, visit AskLeo.com/4369.
I'm Leo Notenboom. And this is
AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.