Comments on: The drive for multidisk PCs

Long-term storage, instant backup and multicore chips are pushing the trend. Will consumers bite?
Photos: Cramming in the hard drives

[jamie.p.walsh]

Are they actually suggesting a 2nd HD in the same machine for backup?

A drive failure is one reason to make backups, yes. But, viruses, worms and security are usually higher on the list. A removeable media option is much better suited for the purpose of backing up files.

[bobby_brady]

Disagree

Lossing digital pictures via drive failure can be terrible. Backing up on DVD or CD isn't foolproof as the damn things can easily get damaged.

[epiccollision]

Backup, no..

data mirroring is only for redundancy...if one hard drive fails then the other takes its place...outside of that no protection is affirmed

[aemarques]

I don't think so...

The last phrase in the article made me wonder:
"if your PC totally crashes, you lose both drives".
Excuse me? I mean, to "crash" is one thing; if the machine totally burns up in flames, is a completely different matter!
When a computer "crashes" you don't loose both disks - actually, you probably don't lose any disk at all...

[Bob Brinkman]

Did I miss a meeting?

"Fox isn't the only heavy-duty PC user worrying about memory. "

Last I checked memory = RAM, disk drives = storage.

[epiccollision]

umm no

the term memory can mean both, they are not mutually exclusive...as in RAM=short term memory HDD= long term memory...it's not quite as simple as your statement

[vchmielewski]

Does this person really understand computers?

I thought the same thing when I read this. I thought calling storage
memory was a mistake only novices made.

[markdoiron]

A Better, Cheaper Answer For Some

data protection should be a top priority feature of the operating system. since more and more homes have more than one pc, there are options for the os to include. what's needed is for the operating system to be smart about the network, and automatically offer to set up unattended hard drive back up operations between the pc's.

also, folks need to be helped to smartly select what they back up: the data, not the applications. the back up software should help them painlessly do this. i know there are after-market solutions, and that windows has a rudimentary back-up capability. but if it came built in to automatically help the consumer set up unattended backup, it'd be more likely used.

indeed, there's no reason the os couldn't offer to back up from one hard drive to another drive in the same pc (provides good protection except against a catastrophic event such as a lightning strike or theft of the pc itself, unless that drive is removable and stored separately--preferably offsite), or between two partitions on one hard drive (provides protection of inadvertent data loss caused by operator error such as editing a file then saving it under the wrong file name that existed with different, important data).

also, for broadband users, the os might be able to offer an unattended backup to a remote site over the connection. with free 1-gb accounts, that could provide backup of quite a bit. and, those who offer the 1-gh accounts would undoubtedly be delighted to offer "premium" accounts with more room to back up more pic's of auntie annie.

bottom line: protection of data is a basic os function. painless, highly effective back up should be included in that definition.

mark d.

got this tips

http://errortest.blogspot.com/2005/08/blackhole-when-one-hard-drive-is-not.html

http://errortest.blogspot.com/2005/07/blackhole-digital-photography.html

http://errortest.blogspot.com/2005/07/blackhole-digital-photography-on-web.html

[Earl Benser]

This is not news.....

1. PC's have always been able to have two internal hard drives

2. If space is available, quad HD controllers will let you run four
hard drives, maybe in addition to the original two.

3. USB2 and Firewire will let you use any number of external
hard drives.

4. Raid technology has been around for maybe 10 years????

5. Mac's had SCSI (7 external devices like hard drives) and now
have Firewire and USB2 with virtually unlimited HD expansion
capability

There never has been any problem with additional hard drives
for a computer. All my Mac's and PC's (except the laptops) have
dual drives, and I have one Mac with 2 internal and 12 external
hard drives.

I suggest that the reporter for this article should get out of bed
and see what is really going on before trying to write his next
article.

[epiccollision]

good point

unless you just started reading news.com...this really isn't much of a story...ummm has the writer(or the editor) used a computer previously...umm ever...i expect better from a "Technology" news service...maybe i should head back over to tomshardeware

[RayGentry]

yeppers

I completely agree. I've had dual hard drive disks since i built my first computer four years ago. I opted not to do raid backup or even mirror my disks. I just use one disk for all my programs and OS and one disk for my media. Speaking of which, I need another, bigger HDD. two 40's and that's still not enough...actually that sounds like my uncle at a reunion...anyway...

Ray J

[dargon19888]

This has to be one of the worst written story...

This article had to be the worst written article that I have seen in a long time. Please excuse my ramblings since I'm going to try and address the myriad of issues....

First, it misuses terms and doesn't have a point.

As someone already pointed out, even with a second drive, if it crashes, you've lost your data.

First, for the "professional" photographer, one simple phrase. "SAN". That's Storage Area Network.
Not too expensive and they usually have raid built in.

Note that the article didn't talk about the different drive technologies. (Free clue. Check out the warranty on the drives. ;-) Look at price vs performance.

Also there are things called hot swappable drives and drive holders. This allows you to swap out a raid disk without having to bring down the server.
(Already been around for a couple of years....)
You can get them for your home PC and even for the novice, if you can follow directions you can put them in your computer. (Or just call Jimmy the 13 yr old from down the street)

If the intent of the article was to talk about how industrial technologies are making their way in to the home PC at a consumer friendly price point, then the author failed to clearly make that point.

Oh and as to backing up homework there's another little device that replaced the "floppy" disk. Its a little fob that contains up to 1GB that plugs in to your USB port. All newer computers have USB and of course the OS's recognize the removeable media. The 256MB price point is around $50.00 and works great.

So what did I miss in my little rant?

Maybe its the fact that rather go out and spend $$$ for a tape back up subsystem, software, and taking the time to create and maintain a back up schedule, you can just implement a raid 5 system with hot swapable drives in a SAN. After all, if you already have a wireless network in your home, or even a wired hub, its just another device you just have to plug in and follow the directions....

Note that with the higher levels of raid, you have more stripes and redundancy on multiple disks. So you just replace them and the raid sofware rebuilds the data on the new disk.

Someone should fire this writer.

Where did CNET find this "tech" writer?

"Gateway's FX-400XL PC for home users and E-6500 PC for professional customers, which are shipping now with a starting price tag of $1,999 and $989 respectively, come with 500GB of memory through two 250GB hard-disk drives. The PCs can be expanded to three drives."

I want a machine with 500 GB of memory.

And this is just one of the examples in this error filled article.

GET A NEW WRITER, CNET!

[bobby_brady]

I gathered

the article was referring to amateur pc users. Mainly mom and dads who are storing photos on a single drive. If that drive goes bad, so does all their photos and they're basically toast.

At least with a second drive, the photos can be restored.

Right now I think the best option for them are external 1394 or usb drives.

[Earl Benser]

Somebody...

... with some technical couth has rewritten parts of the article so it
isn't such a disaster any more. Still not worth reading....

author knows little about subject he's reporting on

It appears that this article was written by someone not too familiar with computers in general and data storage in particular. Aside from intermingling terms ('memory' to describe hard disk storage), (s)he also makes inaccurate statements ("if the computer crashes totally, both disks are gone".) To be honest, I'm not sure what the point of the article is! The reporter points to manufacturers 'beginning to include 2 disks with their systems...' - but that's been the case for a long time! Is (s)he perhaps referring to manufacturers pre-configuring RAIDed systems? If so, it wasn't stated anywhere!

Very disappointing article - I am used to better from news.com :-(

[dargon19888]

Yeah mixing jouranlism and technology ..

Doesn't always work.

From a purely journalistic point of view, the story was poorly written.

From a technical point of view, you have to stop and ask "huh?". ;-)

I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that he was thinking about a PC where the entire C Drive (first hard drive) is mirrored to the second Drive, including the boot sectors. Then if the first disk crashes, when you reboot, you boot from the second drive.

You don't need hot swapable drives since after the first crash, you'll expect the novice user to take the machine in for a repair.

I'd also recommend recovering the second drive on to the new hard drive and then replace the second drive. MTBF still applies and when you consider the $75 you pay just to have barney look at your machine, you might as well replace the second drive with a new one.

Writers sources are incorrect

I agree with you except it was Leslie Fiering, an analyst with the market research firm Gartner, that the writer quoted as to a whole PC failure/crash will cause you to loose all of your data. All of my systems use RAID 1 for the system drive and I have had drive failures that don't require you to do anything but replace the failed drive, as long as your boot.ini is correctly setup.

[ordaj]

This makes no sense...

"I can see a small segment of the market that buys desktop PCs wanting the additional reliability that RAID can offer," Fiering said. "A second drive in a desktop actually makes some sense as a backup for more reliability."

If it's reliable and makes more sense, then consumers wouldn't want it??? Hello? This is exactly what comsumers want. With viruses and the fickleness of PCs, they are looking for reliability and convenience.

Hello???

HELLO???

Did he actually get paid for this?

I believe the other talkback comments have been significantly more informative about backup options then this article.

Maybe Michael Singer should be moved into an area that doesn't actually require any technical knowledge, such as commentary on upcoming movies.

If Mr. Singer wishes to keep writing on such topics, I think he had better take a crash course on computer terminology, and maybe even a course on basic computer design.

I'm also disappointed with news.com for allowing such a news article as this to be posted.

[bobby_brady]

No, I rather read authers who are seasoned pc users

Not someone who took a crash course. CNet needs to get on the ball. However I have a feeling they're going to yank the talkback forums if too many people complain about their authers.

[Tom CyBold]

Storage Fables on Parade

Well, I see I'm not the only one who felt less than enlightened by this story. The teaser sounded so promising, but it fell flat. So, allow me to pile on, too:

1. ?Fox isn't the only heavy-duty PC user worrying about memory. To avoid trouble, many take matters into their own hands by building their own PCs or, like Fox, installing additional disk drives.? If he?s worried about ?memory,? why is he installing extra hard drives, which are storage?

2. ?Gateway's FX-400XL PC for home users . . . come with 500GB of memory through two 250GB hard-disk drives.? Wow, 500 gigs of MEMORY in the form of DISK DRIVES? AMAZING. Again, someone needs to explain the difference between memory and storage to this reporter.

3. Fiering said, ?A second drive in a desktop actually makes some sense as a backup for more reliability. Hard-disk drives do fail, however. And if your PC totally crashes, you lose both drives.?? Huh? In what universe do PCs ?totally crash? in such a way as to simultaneously erase or render inoperable both disk drives to the degree that one or both could not be physically removed and placed in a new PC or external drive case for data recovery? Depressingly, the person who came up with this brilliant flash of insight, ?Leslie Fiering, an analyst with the market research firm Gartner,? is undoubtedly out-earning you and me!

4. RAID Levels 0 and 1 have been available for years on the desktop, at least for Mac users with standard internal and external SCSI buses, such as that found on the 7x00 series of Macs that debuted approximately ten years ago. FWB?s Hard Disk Toolkit, to name just one software package I recommend, could stripe or mirror drives for increased performance of backup security for around fifty bucks and the cost of a second SCSI disk.

5. Surprisingly, this article mentions no ideas for putting multiple drive mechanisms in a single internal drive housing which would fit in an existing drive space, mirror two platters at the hardware level, and provide an alert when one of them fails. Instead, users keep getting ever-larger single-platter designs whose capacity outstrips user storage needs, while leaving them vulnerable to single-disk failure.

6. Apple, come on! A multi-platter drive with hardware redundancy and large cache to load the bulk of OS from RAM would give you yet another big advantage over the staid and unimaginative PeeCee establishment.

computer vulnerabilities

You had said:
3. Fiering said, ?A second drive in a desktop actually makes some sense as a backup for more reliability. Hard-disk drives do fail, however. And if your PC totally crashes, you lose both drives.?? Huh? In what universe do PCs ?totally crash? in such a way as to simultaneously erase or render inoperable both disk drives to the degree that one or both could not be physically removed and placed in a new PC or external drive case for data recovery? Depressingly, the person who came up with this brilliant flash of insight, ?Leslie Fiering, an analyst with the market research firm Gartner,? is undoubtedly out-earning you and me!

If I'm reading this right, your saying that it's impossible for both hard drives to fail in a computer. I have some issues with that comment.

There are countless ways to lose both hard drives: lightning, failing power supply, dropped, bad ide port, and virus just to name a few.

I had one computer that was totally fried when the power supply failed, and sent 110 AC onto the 5V DC line.

Lousy

What a lousy job of reporting. One would think that CNet would make sure the people they hire on would know the difference between memory and storage. Or that a "total system crash" does not necessarily mean data loss (especially since there's many types of "total system crashes"). This article is complete rubbish.

Important Article, Important Topic

Those who have criticized this article and this topic do not know what they are talking about. This is an important article and an important topic. Thank you for writing it. You should be praised and not criticized.

This topic is important, the article isn't.

I don't think I've read a single comment that did not say this was not an important topic.

Everyone agrees that backing up is important.

Everyones comments are about the content of the article. Two aspects specifically.

1)They are making comments about second hard drives, etc. But not even considering such modern advances such as USB keys, external hard drives, burning cd's/dvd's, or even remote backup services.

2) The writers knowledge of computers and the common lingo used when discussing this topic.

To me this article could have been copy and pasted from computer shopper or similiar pc magazine from the mid 80's.

[dargon19888]

Phil White? Convicted felon? Is that you?

You know Phil White former CEO of Informix who got nailed for cooking the books? ;-)

This article is bunk and poorly written.

Get Real!

[Bob Brinkman]

I'm sorry

I didn't realize you worked at an office supply store or I would have given you the respect you deserve.. oh wait.

[bobby_brady]

How come the writers never participate in talkback?

Does CNET have a policy that keeps the writers from participating in talkback?

[Earl Benser]

Not at all....

... I've often seen the article writers respond in the Talkback area.
But maybe some writers just want to stay under cover.....

[alek_nedic]

CNET have a policy

http://www.analogstereo.com/vacuum/miele_carina_s4_galaxy.htm

[miketkrw]

External Firewire Hard Drives

For data backup I think that no solution beats an external hard drive. I prefer firewire because of their speed advantage. External drives can be turned on for back up and then switched off the rest of the time keeping them safer from virus and the like. They can be quickly plugged into any pc in the even of a complete pc failure. They are portable and can be taken with you or stored safely somewhere.

I have been using this method for several years and swear by it.

[rpms]

$7.95 solution: make your hard drive removable

This article really leads consumers off-track. I won't repeat the flaws that other commentators have already pointed out, but I will suggest a simple solution for consumers who want backup capability and/or extra hard drive space.

When you buy an extra hard drive, add a removable rack/tray assembly for as little as $7.95. Here's an example: http://www.centralcomputer.com/itemdetail.asp?item=DRIZZZRCIH4R

The rack goes into a 5.25-inch drive bay* and is connected to an IDE channel. The hard drive goes into the tray. The tray slides into the rack. You can have multiple trays and hence, multiple hard drives. Just slide in the one you want before you turn your computer on.

With (P)ATA hard drives going for less than 50 cents a gigabyte (check the weekly specials at OfficeMax and Staples) and removable rack/tray assemblies going for less than $10 (link provided above), this is a very affordable solution.

Paul Marcelin-Sampson
Santa Cruz, California, USA

* If your computer doesn't have 5.25-inch drive bays (all laptops, Mac mini, etc.); doesn't have an empty 5.25-inch bay (most "barebones" PCs, all Power Macintosh G4 and G5 models, etc.); or has an impaired 5.25-inch bay (check for a fancy, non-removable front cover that's meant for a CD/DVD drive only); just buy an external 5.25-inch FireWire or USB 2.0 enclosure and install the rack there. You can move this external box between different computers, which is a big advantage. If your computer has capable firmware, you'll even be able to boot from the external box in an emergency.

[ciropabon]

The answer won't arrive until they deliver RAID 5 and tapes

RAID 1 is a joke, some sort of glorified automatic copy/paste. RAID 5 makes sense: it only takes 1/3 of the space of the disk to get a complete backup and your system keeps working if a disk fails.

But until you get TAPE AND RAID 5 TOGETHER, as any IT professional can tell you, your data is dangling at the end of the rope if you get a virus, or anything happens besides disk malfunction.

It is impossible to have a 3-disks-RAID-5-and-tape PC, with backup software for dummies, that costs less than U$1.000? I have been waiting this kind of PC for 15 years... I do not know if I can get one before I die.

What's the real problem we're trying to address?

As with most users who've actually installed and using RAID, you quickly discover that you've only addressed part of the problem if you deploy RAID only.

RAID does not "backup" data. It simply protects a user from a disk drive failure - assuming you've not used RAID-0 of course which backs up nothing at all (hence the zero, also know affectionaly as AID-0). RAID cannot protect from virus attacks or disk data corruption brought on by malware, accidential deletions and O/S meltdowns. So you need a combination of RAID with a true "R" capability (so you can stay up and running when a drive fails) and snapshot backup (to protect from malware, rougue O/S actions and accidential deletion).

A well thought out combination of internal RAID 1, 3 or 5 + USB/1394/Ethernet external drive with a backup scheduler can work effectively to create a fully automated backup for your digital photos, camcorder movie productions and downloaded iTunes.

For those interested, this is what I ended up using in my machine which has already saved me a few times:

1. A NetCell driverless and auto-configuring RAID 3 card with three retail 250G drives. This gives me a large F: drive of 500G that survives any one of the three drives failing due to mechanical faults. It also allows me to remove drives and upgrade to large ones without reformatting in the future.

2. A motherboard boot drive C: to hold the O/S and applications. Norton Ghost runs once a week to back up my primary boot drive onto the 500G crash protected drive so if the boot fails or a virus hits my machine, I can re-store worst case back to last week's backup of the primary executables on my PC.

3. A Maxtor USB/1394 Onetouch 300G drive that I use to backup the digital photo, camcorder edited movies and iTune files I really care about (protecting from accidental deletion) and also allow me transport to another PC or laptop.

Smug is definitely th right word

You guys just keep on being smug......It's like you didn't even read what I wrote,you are too busy listening to the din in your head that tells you that you are smarter than everyone else.....the virus writers will get around to your Mac one day when they get bored and realize that infecting Windows PC's isn't as much fun any more....I'll be looking for your self-important ramblings then....but something tells me that I won't find you yapping anymore....and if you consider a self edited curse word offensive,maybe you should read your own writing....Now THAT'S what I call offensive....Oh,by the way,how long has it been since you got.....NO, animals don't count.