With friends like Maxtor, you don't need enemies.
posted by pete on December 4th, 2008
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?
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.
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.
Addressing the two drives inside independently is not provided as an option. It looks like one device, no matter what you do.
Drobo was already being discussed before this post went up, and is what I’m pushing for. Thanks for the recommendation!
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.
December 4th, 2008 at 08:06 AM
hey, you should submit this to the consumerist, sometimes they can get amazing things done for people in similar situations, like possibly getting maxtor to pay up for their bogus products being bogus.
http://consumerist.com/
all the best,
December 4th, 2008 at 09:00 AM
“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…”
*This model will not make grilled cheese sandwiches, brew espresso, or produce quality Slovakian crystal. Except, they don’t tell you that… Make sure to do your research on the product that includes more than just price. There is no guarantee that what you want to do will work with every operating system on the planet. At last check, Mac OS is used by less than 10% of the computers on planet, OS X 10.5 even less. I work in technical support (Windows and Mac) for an imaging technology company and I often here people claim that “Apple said it would work…” Perhaps you have been hanging around the Genius bar too long. More thought should have been given before altering the drive configuration. Admit you made a mistake and you will be on your way to recovery. I understand a large loss of data can be tragic. Use caution. Stick with proven equipment and technology. Consult a true “expert”. If your work is this valuable, expert consultation and configuration would be well worth the price.
December 4th, 2008 at 09:09 AM
Sounds like you bit off more than you could chew. Thinking RAID 0 provided redundancy, tisk tisk. You deserve to loose your data for that misstep. Mac users…Go Figure.
December 4th, 2008 at 09:18 AM
Raid is not a backup solution.
http://www.2brightsparks.com/resources/articles/RAID-is-not-a-backup-solution.html
December 4th, 2008 at 09:24 AM
You described this as being a backup. If it’s a backup, then where’s the original data? Sounds like you moved your data to this new device and then blew away the original. When I move important stuff off my main drive to a backup, I take two additional copies onto DVDs of differing brands.
Also, don’t trust your livelihood to a single copy on RAID 0. If the thing fries in a power surge, both drives are dead. If you accidentally delete the data or there’s filesystem corruption, you now have two identical copies of no data. If you absolutely must depend on RAID, do so with differing brands of drives. An environmental issue that kills one drive (power spike, heat, time in use, etc) is may kill both drives at once. With two differing drives, you stand a better chance of having one fail earlier than the other and give you warning, as opposed to a power blip taking out both drives at once.
Seriously though, a single copy is not a backup. It’s just moving your eggs to a different basket.
December 4th, 2008 at 09:30 AM
Unfortunately, you still need a way to store your files. Consider using FreeNAS, (http://www.freenas.org) it is an excellent free, open source solution to your problem. Based on FreeBSD it is a rock solid OS. It supports Mac’s, Linux, Windows, etc. Mirroring, Stripping, & Syncing drives are also included with many other options. All admin is done from a webpage making it reasonable for many people to use. Using an old computer you could have bought 4-1TB drives mirrored them for 2TB of storage for less than that initial $500. As a side note I have been reading reports of failures of 1.5TB drives(http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863). JB
December 4th, 2008 at 09:37 AM
In all you wisdom you seem to be forgetting one simple fact. A backup, by definition, is a secondary copy of your data to be recovered when your primary data store fails. If your only copy of those files were stored the Maxtor device you do not have a backup, you have an external drive regardless of any RAID configuration. Loosing data is no fun but you only have yourself to blame.
December 4th, 2008 at 09:40 AM
I had 3 Maxtor drives fail on me in two years (one was pre Seagate era). I’m convinced their hardware is just bottom-of-the-barrel stuff that they can slap a price tag on. I’ve been using LaCie and Western Digital since and haven’t had any issues so far. I’m using a LaCie NAS unit and it’s the best investment I’m made for storage.
December 4th, 2008 at 09:40 AM
He did say that it wasn’t documented anywhere that it did not work with Leopard, and that he had to call a number to find this out. It doesn’t matter if only 10% of the computer world uses OS X, when the latest version has been out for a year now. If a company did not support Vista, you would be calling them out on it, even though many, many people didn’t upgrade. I’ll even go so far to say that a very large percentage of Mac users use Leopard, as opposed to Tiger.
December 4th, 2008 at 09:41 AM
Check out this hilarious conversation with Seagate tech support about this “disc”: http://sandbox.chad.org/seag.html
Joe C, #2: Bite it.
December 4th, 2008 at 09:48 AM
So, you set up a “backup” solution, and put it in play with vital data, and you never even tested it? By your own admission, you could not tell what the setup was. Then you used it. You got what you deserved. Its stupid people like you, who complain because you were stupid, that people like me have so much fun laughing at. LOL ROFL Dumb Luser. PEBKAC.
December 4th, 2008 at 09:52 AM
Obviously, if it has two 750GB drives in it, and you are using 1.5TB, there is no redundancy. If RAID1 were working you should only have 750GB of storage.
Second, it does support RAID1. Just configure it to provide two 750GB disk (a.k.a. JBOD or Just-A-Bunch-Of-Disks) and use OS X’s software RAID1. But I don’t expect you to know that. But, if you misconfigure it (against the advice of their tech support!) you don’t get to blame them when it doesn’t work as yo u wished.
Third, if this was a backup what happened to the original? Oh? There was no original? Then this wasn’t a backup drive was it?
Fourth, if you didn’t know how to configure this drive, why the hell did you buy it off ebay (at retail price at that) where you lose the ability to return it?
In the future, backup means at least two separate copies od the data. Ideally one off site (a la jungledisk). And, if you can’t configure your own software, get something idiot proof like Drobo that is also returnable.
December 4th, 2008 at 09:53 AM
I just want to second “Don’t buy Maxtor’s garbage.” I owned the 1TB version of this drive and it worked well for me for just over a year. When the drive failed after only a year I called Maxtor.
I told them I wanted my drive fixed. They told me it’s out of warranty. I said fine, I’ll pay, I still want my drive to work. At that point I was actually told that Maxtor does not support their hardware once it’s out of warranty and that I should either find “a local computer guy” to fix it or buy a new one. This line was repeated by several supervisors.
In summary, Maxtor themselves doesn’t want to support their own garbage, why should we?
December 4th, 2008 at 09:58 AM
Pete – I am really bummed you lost all that stuff, I hope the data recovery goes well.
As for the rest of you, yeah we get it. You are so much smarter than Pete. Cut the guy some slack. Cripes.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:01 AM
Buy a Drobo!
December 4th, 2008 at 10:04 AM
The guy bought a product. It failed within 6 weeks of purchase. That’s bad whatever you self-appointed computer geniuses say. If I buy a car and it fails in 6 weeks, it’s a lemon.
Now why does this happen? Profit margins are so low in the hardware industry that to survive you literally have to ship marginal products. 20 years ago a CPU was rated to last at least 20 years. Nowadays they are rated a few years only. If you require them to last longer you have lower yield, which you can’t make up by increasing price. It’s a rush to the bottom, caused by customers. On the other end, Wall St wants record profits to squander. Engineering and Manufacturing get cut—you know, the people without whom there would not be any product in the first place.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:07 AM
Damn, people can be harsh. Anyway, maybe the person sitting at home will read this and the comments and learn to be very careful with their data. Though people are mean, they are right in pointing out this really wasn’t a ‘backup’. Sucks.
For next time, a better bet for this sort of thing is to just buy an enclosure and hard drives separately. Then, for example, you could have tested if your RAID1 was working by yanking a drive out and seeing if your data was all there. I paid about $400 bucks for a firewire 400/800 enclosure and two 640gb drives. Prices are probably cheaper now.
As others have said, RAID (even RAID1) really isn’t suited for backup. It’s meant for servers, so that you can yank your busted drive out and still keep chugging along. RAID is usually more trouble than it is worth for people that don’t need this level of uptime. A simpler solution is to just run a dual enclosure like you bought in JBOD mode (just a bunch of drives, mentioned above) and have one drive mirror the other. No RAID tables to rebuild, etc. You have two copies of your data, which is really all you wanted. I still think you are better off with two totally separate devices storing your data.
Hopefully i’ve managed to say all this without coming off as a dick. Good luck with the recovery. I want to go home and hug all my external hard drives now.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:11 AM
Paul C said:
Actually, I’d say that virtually all actively-used Macs are running 10.5. I don’t know anybody who is still on 10.4. There is very little hesitation when it comes to Mac users upgrading their systems. I can’t fathom why Maxtor/Seagate can’t support an OS that has been available to developers since March 2007, and which is not too fundamentally different from the previous version. I dunno, maybe their drive utility used a boatload of deprecated libraries?
December 4th, 2008 at 10:22 AM
Just writing to second Mike Seth. Buy a Drobo. I have had mine attached to a mac with HFS+, a windows xp machine with ntfs, and a freebsd machine with UFS/softupdates. there is a control application for most operating systems, and it integrates with time machine if you are a mac user. Of course, make sure you have at least two drives in it before copying over anything important.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:24 AM
John said: “I’d say that virtually all actively-used Macs are running 10.5. I don’t know anybody who is still on 10.4.”
I run machelp.org as a hobby, and get 10-15 questions and pleas for help every day. I’d say that out of the ~4500 people that have emailed me in the past year and a half, only about half of them are running 10.5. Another 25% are running 10.4, and the rest are running whatever their system came with – 10.2, 10.3, and I even had one guy who was still on 10.1 “because it does what I need to do”.
There’s still a HUGE hardware base out there that won’t ever be ABLE to run anything past 10.4.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:25 AM
After my laptop was stolen and replaced, I plugged in my Maxtor OneTouch III 750GB to copy files back to my computer. The eternal glitched and I lost my entire portfolio not to mention photos that I’ll never get back and music that I already have. Class action anyone?
December 4th, 2008 at 10:32 AM
Data doesn’t exist until it exists in two geographically different locations.
Even if you had the right RAID settings, what happens someone upstairs springs a leak and you come home and find the box in six inches of water?
Disks are so cheap these days. I simply buy naked disks, image my internal disks onto them. I have one copy in my desk at work, one copy at a friend’s house. Of course, if New York gets nuked, I lose my data, but then I doubt I’ll care.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:33 AM
I faced the same dilemma at some point, with a RAID case by a different manufacturer, but fortunately never lost any data to a failed hard drive. Optical media are a different matter alltogether and I stopped using them for long-term storage as they’re unreliable. I ended up using an older G4 as a file server and clone my data to a 2nd drive overnight. to play it safe, I backup the same set of data to Amazon S3 and to another hard drive in a different location. finally I feel safe about my photographs and can sleep at night.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:40 AM
The Zero in RAID 0 stands for the amount of data you will recover in case of failure.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:48 AM
So what is the no-brainer solution for backup these days? A lot of these comments don’t really seem to address the problem. I am getting to the point where I am getting nervous about losing my shit, but I don’t have a fucking clue what to do about it.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:53 AM
It’s not just Maxtor.. There is something fishy about terabyte hard drives. I have the feeling that the technology wasn’t really stable and ready for prime time, but market pressure pushed manufacturers to release lower quality products in order to win the “space race”.
Last year I bought a one terabyte Western Digital hard drive for my job, I had limited budget and this was for non-critical data. So I though I could put it on a huge USB hard drive until I get the necessary budget to buy a suitable solution, a matter of months probably.
So I installed the drive with EXT3 filesystem and copied the stuff on it, keeping a safe copy elsewhere.. just in case. Eventually I got to 700~800TB of data, I needed to delete my safe copy because I had no space left on the server. So for a couple of months I would had to rely on my brand new TB hard drive to keep our data safe.
I though, hell, it’s only a couple of months and the data will be copied elsewhere before the drive finish is first year of existence. So I made a huge mistake, I rolled the dices.
Sure enough one week later the hard drive was dead and we lost 700GB of data we accumulated over the years.
If only the story would end there..
We sent the hard drive to a specialized data recovery company located in Toronto which claimed to be partner of Western Digital, thus honoring its guaranties. After a month and a 1000$ bill, we got our replacement drive with about 20GB of recovered data out of 700GB on it and 80% of it useless or unusable.
Better yet, after this misfortune the drive spent a couple of months on my desk. I wasn’t sure yet if I would plug it back or run over repeatedly it with my car. When I finally plugged it back it took only about 2 hours to fail again.
Now the drive is back to my hardware provider, where I bought it. It’s been over a month and my provider have really hard time to honor the warranty because Western Digital does not recognize the serial number of the replacement drive the recovery company sent me.
I hate hard drives.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:54 AM
Just do what this dude says: http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html (It’s an entertaining read to boot: “The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don’t push it.”)
December 4th, 2008 at 10:54 AM
no data no charge policy? WOOT! those old school nerds rock!
December 4th, 2008 at 11:06 AM
thanks for that – I was 30s away from buyin this thing (now I will NOT).
I think I will get some 1tb wd drives in a nice enclosure and sync my data (twice).
December 4th, 2008 at 11:09 AM
I’ve busted two WD external hard drives within a year – I’m rough on my stuff and I admit that it is completely my fault. However, if you really want protection, don’t buy an external drive – especially not from any of these guys. They lock up the drive in an almost impossible to open case (the first drive had screws using a proprietary, tamperproof head) that if you try to open (even if you don’t resort to cutting, as I had to do) will void your warranty…oh, and if you want your data recovered they’ll LOOK at it, no promises, for $750 minimum charge.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:11 AM
you should try the new offering from Zmanda – ZIB (Zmanda Internet Backup). Quick and painless backup to the cloud (amazon s3).
December 4th, 2008 at 11:16 AM
As I said up thread, your best bet is to buy an enclosure, and put hard drives in it. The enclosures hard drive manufactures sell are all crap for the most part.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:20 AM
Hey,
you are stupid. If Seagate hasn’t published software to that will support raid on the external enclosure with the newer mac os yet and you lose your data because you use a Mac then buy a PC for half the cost and throw Linux on it.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:39 AM
Ever since I had a Maxtor external drive give me the click of death after less than a year of use, I avoid the Maxtor brand like the plague. Heck, my cheap little simpletech drive has lasted longer with no problems.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:41 AM
At my old job we shared a building with a company called File Engine. They provide you with what is basically a backup mini-server for a very reasonable monthly rate. I think it might be a little overkill for what you need (it would be much more expensive in $’s) but it’s nice, because it backs up all your data on the mini-server and also at File Engine’s server. Their sales guy told me once that something like 90% of all small businesses that loss all their data go out of business within a year. I believe it. Data loss can be catastrophic.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Repeat after me: RAID is not Backup. RAID is not Backup. One more time…
RAID1 Mirroring is not a valid backup strategy. It will save you from hardware failure (usually), but there are a great number of more likely catastrophes that it will not save you from—and may actually make worse. Directory Structure or Partition Map corruption, for instance, will instantly be applied to both drives in the set. Accidental file deletion will also be instantly applied to both drives.
RAID is not Backup. RAID is about hardware redundancy, not logical/data redundancy. One drive has failed, you can keep going. It will never save you from a logical failure.
Always, always, always have a backup on completely media. I run a business where I need a 12TB RAID5 set to store all my data. I do not rely on the RAID5 for data integrity; RAID5 will not save me from accidentally deleting a file, or if my RAID card fails and chews up the parity data, or any number of other failures. No, I have a second 12TB RAID5 set that the first backs up to via rsync once a week.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:14 PM
While not meant for multiple TB of data, Carbonite (or many other) online backup utilities easily saves all my documents and photos. It’s even saved an InDesign file that I could go online and grab a much earlier version of….. easy too as it adds little dots to icons letting you know if it’s backed up or not at a glance. Worth checking out for personal use.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:32 PM
I wonder if Pete will ReThink his back-up ways :) I’d like to see the rebuff of all the comments here. They hold some truly valuable information about how backup systems and software work.
The best part of this, is now Pete has a massive amount of valuable information on how backup systems can work, and can apply them to his next backup system, taking all of the best practices into consideration.
And don’t forget to fully test that system backup, restore, and verify before using it full time.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:57 PM
Wow Pete, you sure managed to stir-up the pot with this one. I’m using Time Machine with a 500GB external drive that I bought about a year ago. I’m lucky that I don’t have all that much data but I still feel like I should be doing more, I’ve actually been toying with the idea of using S3 to store all of my old photos.
December 4th, 2008 at 01:05 PM
How do you set up a raid 0 thinking it’s a raid 1? Nothing in OSX will tell you? And you were unsure if it was backing up your stuff but you used it anyway as your only backup? You were asking for it. You can’t blame Maxtor this is 100% user error.
December 4th, 2008 at 01:07 PM
Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. Raid is not backup. The end.
December 4th, 2008 at 01:08 PM
I don’t know where you got these morons commenting. Your article is hilarious and I feel your pain.
December 4th, 2008 at 01:39 PM
Sounds like you’re a mac user. This is to be expected. Get a real computer.
December 4th, 2008 at 01:45 PM
I’ve had more Maxtor drives fail on me than any others; plus some weird mother-board compatibility problems from their drives. They are truly complete and utter tools.
December 4th, 2008 at 01:51 PM
Well George is right, but not very helpful. Raid is a way to increase fault tolerance (diminish disk failure) and possibly performance. But if you accidentally delete a file, change it improperly, or something becomes corrupted, it’s gone in both disks immediately. Without a backup, you can’t restore it.
I have told this over and over to my friends: Do not bother with Raid on your home system unless you need to store over a terabyte of data. Just take backups. You can then always retrieve an earlier version or missing file. I have seen Raid fail on multiple occasions, even occasionally on the enterprise level. Backup, backup, backup.
December 4th, 2008 at 02:04 PM
I am an IT Director at a large school. We purchased 4 of these drives over the course of a year. 3 of them failed right after warranty cutoff. Theses drives did not last a year. Number 4 but was still under warranty. Cost 10 bucks to RMA. Got the drive back worked for about a month then failed again. These are the worst drives I have encountered in my ten years in this business. Completely unreliable I will never purchase anything from Seagate or Maxtor again.
December 4th, 2008 at 02:27 PM
Ahhh Maxtor One-Touch…...
So now…. all my clients data was still locked on a on a MAXTOR 1-TB ONE-TOUCH DRIVE [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO] and I couldn’t even get parts to fix it? ” I WAS SCREWED..”
BUT NOW IT GETS INTERESTING… A few hours after the Call to the Maxtor Tech….. I get an email from Maxtor asking me to ask how I felt about Maxtor’s Great Support and wonderful service???? = I was primed… the fuse was burning!!! I guess was really Pissed!!! “I had no way to recover all my clients Data. and MAXTOR would not even sell me the little Part!” So in their Questionarre…. I told them what I thought!!! I told them how bad I thought their Great SERVICE WAS!!! and I felt a little better venting into an email…. I expected no response from that email…
BUT WAIT…....A CALL FROM MAXTOR: A few weeks had passed…. I get a voicemail message from a Maxtor… Someone saying that they would like to talk with me about my problem with the Maxtor One-Touch Drive… I returned the call… But Now, I was expected results… and was hoping that they would not leave me hanging like this and ship me the little part… But I was wrong.. Maxtor just called me to apologized to me??? I said to them… “Look I don’t need a Hug…. I need the interface card.!!! So that I can recover all my clients data [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO] off of your ONE-TOUCH drives. I need to know one thing… Can you get me a replacement card?” Maxtor replied: “No… But, what I can tell you that it is not as bad as you think!” I said: “Excuse me… It’s Not??” Maxtor said: “The Drives are NOT STRIPED!!!” I said:” what? Excuse me…. I know how they were striped! because I set them up a (RAID – 0) [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO].” “Maxtor said: Well there not striped…. there Contiguous.” I said to him “Contiguous?? That even after I setup the drives myself on the Maxtor control panel as Raid Zero Configuration that they were not in Raid Zero and they were in Contiguous??? Maxtor said; “Correct!!!!”
I said…. “Isn’t that a Lie?” ~ (No Comment from Maxtor.)
I was then told that by Maxtor that knowing this information… it would be easier for me to recover all my data now. Now that I know that all my data wasn’t ever striped Raid Zero or even striped at all.
Currently: Yes it was true that the ONE-TOUCH DRIVES were not ever set to contiguous regardless of how you configured them.. But, regardless In the ugly process of recovery off of MAXTOR setup drives without that interface card the drives data wasn’t recognized by the new system without reformatting the drive. So that option gone…. I tried data “Phoenix Stelar Data Recovery Software” and Did recover a full Image of the data from Both of the drives in the Maxtor set. But, after many weeks of trying… all files that were recovered were now corrupted…
IN SUMMERY:
FIRST OF ALL ~ I am perturbed about buying a product that specifically indicated in writing that it could be configured as (RAID – 0) and [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO] to only find out that I was lied to. and that it was bogus and knowingly a false .
SECONDLY ~ My business for two years was all wrapped up in the files on those drives… For a Company like Maxtor/Seagate to just willy-nilly throw a wrench into my business and the other business that bought their products.. Maxtor Chooses to not support their good clients and choose to not even sell a tiny little part to stop me from recovering all of me data which damages my relationships with all my clients…. That decision made by Maxtor/Seagate is totally despicable. And short sited and stupid from a business standpoint.
After this I won’t trust a word they say or a word of print and I will never do business with Maxtor/Seagate again.
Gerard
December 4th, 2008 at 02:29 PM
Ahhh Maxtor One-Touch…... I have special place in my heart for that drive… I bought two 1-TB drives (with firewire 800) I paid around $960.00 for each drive. I ran them on two machines for video editing. (1) was a G-5 Quad with Tiger and a (2) MacBookPro. I set them up with the Maxtor One-Touch Control Panel to run as [STRIPED AS RAID (0) ZERO] <<That is Important to remember. years. Now… after that length of time they were getting full of all my clients projects… and between the Maxtor tech and I… we both determined that the interface card between the two drives inside the one touch drive had failed.
So now…. all my clients data was still locked on a on a MAXTOR 1-TB ONE-TOUCH DRIVE [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO] and I couldn’t even get parts to fix it? ” I WAS SCREWED..”
BUT NOW IT GETS INTERESTING… A few hours after the Call to the Maxtor Tech….. I get an email from Maxtor asking me to ask how I felt about Maxtor’s Great Support and wonderful service???? = I was primed… the fuse was burning!!! I guess was really Pissed!!! “I had no way to recover all my clients Data. and MAXTOR would not even sell me the little Part!” So in their Questionarre…. I told them what I thought!!! I told them how bad I thought their Great SERVICE WAS!!! and I felt a little better venting into an email…. I expected no response from that email…
BUT WAIT…....A CALL FROM MAXTOR: A few weeks had passed…. I get a voicemail message from a Maxtor… Someone saying that they would like to talk with me about my problem with the Maxtor One-Touch Drive… I returned the call… But Now, I was expected results… and was hoping that they would not leave me hanging like this and ship me the little part… But I was wrong.. Maxtor just called me to apologized to me??? I said to them… “Look I don’t need a Hug…. I need the interface card.!!! So that I can recover all my clients data [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO] off of your ONE-TOUCH drives. I need to know one thing… Can you get me a replacement card?” Maxtor replied: “No… But, what I can tell you that it is not as bad as you think!” I said: “Excuse me… It’s Not??” Maxtor said: “The Drives are NOT STRIPED!!!” I said:” what? Excuse me…. I know how they were striped! because I set them up a (RAID – 0) [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO].” “Maxtor said: Well there not striped…. there Contiguous.” I said to him “Contiguous?? That even after I setup the drives myself on the Maxtor control panel as Raid Zero Configuration that they were not in Raid Zero and they were in Contiguous??? Maxtor said; “Correct!!!!”
I said…. “Isn’t that a Lie?” ~ (No Comment from Maxtor.)
I was then told that by Maxtor that knowing this information… it would be easier for me to recover all my data now. Now that I know that all my data wasn’t ever striped Raid Zero or even striped at all.
Currently: Yes it was true that the ONE-TOUCH DRIVES were not ever set to contiguous regardless of how you configured them.. But, regardless In the ugly process of recovery off of MAXTOR setup drives without that interface card the drives data wasn’t recognized by the new system without reformatting the drive. So that option gone…. I tried data “Phoenix Stelar Data Recovery Software” and Did recover a full Image of the data from Both of the drives in the Maxtor set. But, after many weeks of trying… all files that were recovered were now corrupted…
IN SUMMERY:
FIRST OF ALL ~ I am perturbed about buying a product that specifically indicated in writing that it could be configured as (RAID – 0) and [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO] to only find out that I was lied to. and that it was bogus and knowingly a false .
SECONDLY ~ My business for two years was all wrapped up in the files on those drives… For a Company like Maxtor/Seagate to just willy-nilly throw a wrench into my business and the other business that bought their products.. Maxtor Chooses to not support their good clients and choose to not even sell a tiny little part to stop me from recovering all of me data which damages my relationships with all my clients…. That decision made by Maxtor/Seagate is totally despicable. And short sited and stupid from a business standpoint.
After this I won’t trust a word they say or a word of print and I will never do business with Maxtor/Seagate again.
Gerard
December 4th, 2008 at 02:34 PM
Ahhh Maxtor One-Touch… I have special place in my heart for that drive… I bought two 1-TB drives (with firewire 800) I paid around $960.00 for each drive. I ran them on two machines for video editing. (1) was a G-5 Quad with Tiger and a (2) MacBookPro. I set them up with the Maxtor One-Touch Control Panel to run as [STRIPED AS RAID (0) ZERO] . My first thoughts were… The drives would not mount sometimes and the they would be fine for a while and they would un-mount. Aside from those ongoing buggy mounting problems… I worked with the bugs and used them and for a around two years. Now… after that length of time they were getting full of all my clients projects… One day one of the drives wouldn’t mount at all… So, I called Maxtor and talked with their tech department (Real Nice Guys) and between the Maxtor tech and I… we both determined that the interface card between the two drives inside the one touch drive had failed. But unfortunately he said… that both of my One-Touch 1-TB Drives were now both out of warranty. I said Okay no problem… I will pay to have it repaired… The Maxtor Tech said that they couldn’t take it in for repair if it was out a warranty! I said Okay… That’s fine then… “I would like to buy the replacement interface card.” But I don’t have a part number…. The Maxtor tech responded… “We don’t sell any parts we are only warranty service center…” I said Okay… Can you connect me with the Parts Department at Maxtor ? The Maxtor tech responded… NO we don’t sell parts…. We only do warranty service. The tech said that he was very sorry that he couldn’t do anything to repair the situation .
So now…. all my clients data was still locked on a on a MAXTOR 1-TB ONE-TOUCH DRIVE [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO] and I couldn’t even get parts to fix it? ” I WAS SCREWED..” BUT NOW IT GETS INTERESTING… A few hours after the Call to the Maxtor Tech….. I get an email from Maxtor asking me to ask how I felt about Maxtor’s Great Support and wonderful service???? = I was primed… the fuse was burning!!! I guess was really Pissed!!! “I had no way to recover all my clients Data. and MAXTOR would not even sell me the little Part!” So in their Questionarre…. I told them what I thought!!! I told them how bad I thought their Great SERVICE WAS!!! and I felt a little better venting into an email…. I expected no response from that email… BUT WAIT…....A CALL FROM MAXTOR: A few weeks had passed…. I get a voicemail message from a Maxtor… Someone saying that they would like to talk with me about my problem with the Maxtor One-Touch Drive… I returned the call… But Now, I was expected results… and was hoping that they would not leave me hanging like this and ship me the little part… But I was wrong.. Maxtor just called me to apologized to me??? I said to them… “Look I don’t need a Hug…. I need the interface card.!!! So that I can recover all my clients data [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO] off of your ONE-TOUCH drives. I need to know one thing… Can you get me a replacement card?” Maxtor replied: “No… But, what I can tell you that it is not as bad as you think!” I said: “Excuse me… It’s Not??” Maxtor said: “The Drives are NOT STRIPED!!!” I said:” what? Excuse me…. I know how they were striped! because I set them up a as STRIPED RAID ZERO.” “Maxtor said: Well there not striped…. they’re Contiguous.” I said to him “Contiguous Your Telling me even after I setup the drives myself on the Maxtor control panel as “Raid Zero Configuration” that they were not in Raid Zero and they were in Contiguous??? Maxtor said; “CORRECT!!!!” I said…. “Isn’t that a Lie?” ~ (No Comment from Maxtor.) I was then told that by Maxtor that knowing this information… it would be easier for me to recover all my data now. Now that I know that all my data wasn’t ever striped Raid Zero or even striped at all.
Currently: Yes it was true that the ONE-TOUCH DRIVES were not ever set to contiguous regardless of how you configured them.. But, regardless In the ugly process of recovery off of MAXTOR setup drives without that interface card the drives data wasn’t recognized by the new system without reformatting the drive. So that option gone…. I tried data “Phoenix Stelar Data Recovery Software” and Did recover a full Image of the data from Both of the drives in the Maxtor set. But, after many weeks of trying… all files that were recovered were now corrupted…
IN SUMMERY: FIRST OF ALL ~ I am perturbed about buying a product that specifically indicated in writing that it could be configured as (RAID – 0) and [STRIPED AS RAID ZERO] to only find out that I was lied to. and that it was bogus and knowingly a false .
SECONDLY ~My business for two years was all wrapped up in the files on those drives… For a Company like Maxtor/Seagate to just willy-nilly throw a wrench into my business and the other business that bought their products.. Maxtor Chooses to not support their good clients and choose to not even sell a tiny little part to stop me from recovering all of me data which damages my relationships with all my clients…. That decision made by Maxtor/Seagate is totally despicable. And short sited and stupid from a business standpoint.
After this I won’t trust a word they say or a word of print and I will never do business with Maxtor/Seagate again.
Gerard
December 4th, 2008 at 03:06 PM
Maxtors are known to be utterly fantastic paperweights.
December 4th, 2008 at 03:37 PM
I have mistrust in simple off the shelf multi-disk storage products – they suck.
The following schemes have served me well: -File dump server 2 ordinary drives (no raid) , data is stored on one drive and a scheduler (CRON) runs a script that rsyncs data from one drive to another. Cheap, easy to setup, no additional hardware needed. -Raid controller for my desktop 3ware Inc 9650SE with 4 drives in Raid5. Easy to setup and works with linux and windows quiet well.
Raid card set me back around 500 cad with shipping and taxes, 4 drives were another 500. This setup is pretty much guarantees that you won’t need data recovery service, and is far cheaper.
For an options project, I have 5 backups of the dataset in total. 2 as in a database and 3 as a database dump sitting on different systems. While the data set that I have can be recreated in a few days, it would still be a pain. I can’t imagine recreating photos!
December 4th, 2008 at 03:48 PM
disk backups are over. who wants to worry about that shit? let someone else worry about it.
http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ + amazon S3
DONE.
December 4th, 2008 at 03:49 PM
Thats Apples problem not Maxtor. If they would stop releasing so many versions of OSX in an attempt to squeeze more money out of its users (like the apple tax isn’t enough) the software developers would have an easier time supporting their products. It is your fault for not doing the research prior to buying the device. As all computer savvy techs know, you usually don’t find the answers you are looking for from any manufacturers website. We troll forums for hours finding the answers we need by sorting through much knowledgeable and some ignorant posts. It is our responsibility to put the data together and make sense out of it.
That being said a quick google search with the words Maxtor OneTouch III 1.5TB support raid 1 leopard yields tons of data and forum posts saying that this drive isn’t supported in 10.5 for raid 1.
Shame on you for being so ignorant and quick to point the finger at someone else when you should be taking this as a learning experience that it is your own fault you lost you data… nice try though.
December 4th, 2008 at 05:29 PM
First, the drive was bought on eBay, not in a store or from a known and trusted internet based company (newegg, cdw, etc etc). 6 weeks is probably a great up time for drives bought on ebay. Never, EVER buy hard drives on eBay. You can get all sorts of nasty suprises, the drive could’ve been from a batch with high failure rates that Maxtor/Seagate sold to a third party at a cut rate price.
Second, you never, EVER, store important data on a USB device, regardless of RAID 1. I barely trust the high end RAID hardware and configurations, much less the low end usb ones with JBOD and the like.
Third, you should have done some research prior to purchasing the drive, not just hitting their knowledge base. Search Google for the drive model or type and your OS. If you did and didn’t get hits, it happens, bad luck on this one.
Fourth and finally, if your data is worth recovering, and $2900 is a good deal in the event the drives are really hosed and you really want the data, next time, spend $2900 on a real solution and buy a server with a real hardware raid controller and more than just a 2 disk RAID-1 solution. At this point, it might even be worth it to get a dedicated server or higher end VPS in a datacenter to back your data up to another location.
One last note: get off the Maxtor crack asap, I used them for years since they were usually the cheapest, highest failure rates of the hundreds of drives I’ve worked with, even worse than the IBM/Hitachi drives from Hungary (20gb drives with massive failure rates). Seagate had a strong track record with their 5 year warranty but since they ate Maxtor quality is fleeting for anything not 3.5” SAS..
Cheers.
December 4th, 2008 at 06:03 PM
http://www.impalaclub.com/naisso/magmoss.htm
December 4th, 2008 at 06:59 PM
This topic is beyond your comprehension. You’re just pissed because you didn’t do enough research ahead of time and got burned. It’s OK though, this happens to everyone. Use it to make a better decision in the future. I would recommend you speak to someone that knows more about computers and providing a redundant infrastructure (even if it’s small-scale) for your requirements.
That guy above “someone” is right—RAID is not a backup solution. It is a single layer. Please, seek the help of a professional!
December 4th, 2008 at 07:41 PM
i sympathize with your dilemma, but your expectation exceeds the capability of the technology you purchased. granted all drive vendors sell these multi-drive enclosures as the super secure solution, but i wouldn’t trust a raid unless it had at least 5 live drives and 1 cold spare… why didn’t you just use the built in tools in OSX and create your own mirrored drive array?
there’s an adage in archiving/backup circles: data doesn’t exist unless it’s in 3 places. i’ve also heard it expressed as data doesn’t really exist unless you have 2 copies(i take this to be 3 places= 1 original+ 2 copies)....
in any event, the lessons you should learn are: 1) RAIDS ARE NOT A BACKUP. not raid 1, 3, 5, 6, 1+0, 3+0, 5+0 or 6+0. none of them. never have been. there should always be a backup to a raid. cd’s, dvd’s, magnetic tape. or another drive of equal or larger capacity. 2) an archive is not a back up. what you described is an ARCHIVE or DATA MIGRATION, i.e. migrate the data from one media to another, and remove it from the original location. you expect your archive to be a repository for files you want to keep but don’t have room on a live system(like a laptop). 3) so-called raid solutions that only have 2 drives are NOT TO BE TRUSTED. what makes you think a cheap $300 solution is really that worthy? real hardware raids cost several thousands of dollars, or OS based soft raid which can cost a little more than the cost of the drives and enclosures. if you want a raid solution, make sure you have more than 2 drives.
if you really wanted a mirrored drive for a file archive, i would suggest you do a little homework on a usb or firewire dual drive enclosure. check out the offerings at new egg. a dual drive enclosure plugged into your mac will be seen as two physical drives, which you can then mirror/raid1 in DISK UTILITIES. never trust a 3rd party drive software if your operating system has it’s own app. i have a friend who uses an old G4 with a mess of external firewire drives configured in raid 5 via disk utilities. if the system fails(dropped drive) he has a cold spare that he kicks in to rebuild the failed drive.
lastly, if your data is truly to be secure, i would suggest burning multiple discs(cd or dvd) and storing them in DIFFERENT locations.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:14 PM
Here’s how to remember the difference between RAID 0 and RAID 1: the number is equal to the portion of the data you will get back if one drive fails. If you can remember this, you’ll never be confused again :)
December 4th, 2008 at 10:53 PM
Hey Pete!
Let me know how you end up backing your stuff up; I’m about to take a dive and choose either a Drobo or a Netgear NV+.
The Drobo is cheaper, but it’s got that whole proprietary filesystem thing, which shifts the weak point from the drives to Drobo the company still selling these things when mine breaks.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:27 PM
I made my choice when I was a kid… I chose a career in art, not programming, as I was offered to learn about from my brother, here. Theatre, to be more exact, was my calling. Thus, I know about RAID and backups about as much as I know about Ruby or what have you, and that’s as much as I could glean from casual conversation and hanging out with unspacers and other friendly geeks.
This is what I do know: if I spoke to my peers in theatre the way some of you have spoken to Pete in this thread, I would quickly find myself without job prospects, without mentors and without friends. I think it’s deplorable that people feel the relative annonymity the internet provides us grants you carte blanche to snidely belittle and condemn without a second thought. The worst thing is I believe this lack of respect and malevolence is spreading outside the cozy confines of your swivel chair and keyboard, and right into the words and actions of people I encounter in my day-to-day life.
Maybe it gives you a nice little ROFL, “Smarter than you”, but it makes me sick.
PS – Pete, you really should think about letting people with experience with computers sort this kind of thing out for you. snort Riiiiight.
December 5th, 2008 at 12:26 AM
2 copies isn’t worth it. You need at least three. If one of your two copies gets corrupted then how do you know which one is the corrupted one? If you’ve got 3 copies then you can tell. Offsite backups are really the only kind of backups.
December 5th, 2008 at 02:35 AM
I was an early adopter of the same setup 1TB model. After uploading all 5 of my 200gig hard drives on to it It stopped working. Bye Bye all my movies and music. Thankfully I still had most of it on my older drives but I lost a ton of my game roms.
December 5th, 2008 at 03:59 AM
This may not make you feel better at this point but I can recommend Stardom Sohoraid (http://www.stardom.com.tw/sohoraid_spec.htm). I also wanted simple and secure raid1 data storage and I was fed up with keeping an extra networked Linux box running with software raid1.
My requirements were
- as a Linux/Mac user -platform-independence (you can setup raid1 and everything else manually via the front-panel console), ability to buy drives separately (I bought two drives from different manufacturers to ensure they won’t go off at the same time), and simplicity and transparency (no gazillion controls to fail with; shows up as one drive in Linux, no messing with LVM etc.).It’s also easy to verify the raid1 functionality: I simply unloaded each of the drive trays in turn and verified that my data was still there and accessible. The raid box automatically reconstructs the whole disk when the removed drive is re-inserted. Couldn’t get much easier! Besides, the gray brushed steel box looks cool :)
December 5th, 2008 at 04:45 AM
I’m truely sorry for your lots.