Have a hard drive go bad lately?

I once had 7+ years of print magazine content across four publications to maintain. The IT guys gave me grief over my demands to house all 1.5TB on the main storage drive. When I told them the content cost us over half a million dollars they decided it was worthy of being in the good backup.

You've probably got $750k worth of content, I'd be spreading that across more than a few sources. Hell, I'd throw a few copies on tape drives and put them in a safety deposit box. Just the photos (and related usage rights) are worth a fortune.

This reminds me, I need to figure out how to either get the SATA ports on my old MoBo to wake up or get a cheap ($20) Sata Raid PCI card.

Jerry From LA wrote: had a series of DeskStars (Deathstars?) go down....

I use Deskstars for storage. I call the array "Sinistar." It hungers.

I have enough room on my cloud for the entire drive, so it will go up there, too. Plus I'm making another copy right now.

We've got far, far more than just that single drive, and our main database is backed up at many physical locations and on the cloud. Take that, chance and misfortune!

Of course, if I told you more I'd have to kill you. That's the nature of IT security.

Since I made the comment about replacing spinning disks with SSDs, I should also point out how not all SSDs are created equal. TLDR: I haven't seen one die yet.

I use the Samsung 850 Pro for anything critical. The 850 Pro is the best out there that I am aware of for both speed and longevity and even has a 10 year warranty. Link to test: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8239/update-on-samsung-850-pro-endurance-vnand-die-size

I have some older SSDs in non-critical machines: 1. Kingston HyperX: be REALLY careful with the connectors on these as they are fragile. Kingston will replace them if you complain.

1. OCZ Agility 3: an older model, but they seem to be pretty reliable after 5 years now.

2. Samsung 850 EVO: the cheap version of the Pro. Great just about anywhere and really fast.

3. Crucial M4: seems to be pretty good. This will be going into my HTPC when I get around to it.

You should still maintain good backups. I put my photos on Amazon, Dropbox, Flickr, and Google Photos just in case. I use google docs for any documents.

I put an 850 EVO when I replaced DD#2's laptop drive a few months ago.