[manaox2]

Quote:

I have 4 2TB drives, not 1 large 8TB drive. That way I can only lose 2TB of data at any given time.

Im afraid more then one drive can fail at once. For example, 2Tb drives are not recommended for RAID striping because of the statistical chance that after one drive fails that another will likely fail before the array can be rebuilt causing a catastrophic loss. Just imagine if their was a power surge. An isolated backup or two is always a good idea.

 

[DougofTheAbaci]

 
Quote:

Just by same HDD as the one that failed on you and replace parts that are bad, and you should be good to go and copy all over your stuff. Did that few times, but dont expect long life due to dust entering hdd, unless you have 100% dust free environment. 

 

Which you don't, just to be clear. People don't realize this but there's dust everywhere and in everything. Ever looked through a sunbeam and seen the little bits of dust that float through the air? Chances are every room you've ever been in is like that.
 
Now, you can definitely do what DraganUS is suggesting and it's definitely worth a try. It'll cost you like $80 for a new drive, if that. Just make sure you have somewhere to put the data and that the drive you buy is the exact same model. Just drop the platters into the new drive but understand that both drives are now 100% useless once you've finished making the recovery.

 

[brasewel]

Quote:

Im afraid more then one drive can fail at once. For example, 2Tb drives are not recommended for RAID striping because of the statistical chance that after one drive fails that another will likely fail before the array can be rebuilt causing a catastrophic loss. Just imagine if their was a power surge. An isolated backup or two is always a good idea.

True, but I got a lot of garbage in them lol.
 

 

[estreeter]

We covered a lot of this ground in a recent thread:
 
http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/553341/are-you-backing-up-your-digital-collection
 
I've had desktop hard drives go in less than 2 weeks on brand new machines we've sold to our customers, and I've had other folk bring in 5-year old clunkers that are still going strong - general feeling is that the manufacturers are just pushing drives out the door in Asia by the container load and treating warranty returns as 'the cost of doing business' - I dont have any proof of that, but of all the components in a modern PC the mechanical hard drive seems to be the most failure prone.
 
None of this will be comforting to the OP right now, but hopefully threads like this will have others investing in a portable HDD, at a minimum. 'Forensic' data recovery sounds great until you get a quote - we got one for a customer about a month back and it dimmed his enthusiasm completely.