P2 Long-term storage disk utilities

tbob

tbob

Active member
So I think at this point, most people are archiving their P2 footage on hard drives -- and if they're smart, two redundant hard drives.

But I'm wondering about disk utilities to use. The following thread recommends 'putting a hard drive through its paces' before writing data to it, and on the archived drives that contain your footage, 'verifying disk integrity' without affecting the data on the drive.

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?40936-P2-Storage

It seems like there are a TON of Win/PC applications which perform these functions, but I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations for Mac/OSX utilities to 'burn-in' a HDD or to 'verify data integrity'?

Is the 'Disk Utility' included with OSX good enough for doing this, or is there something else that people are using?

Thanks for the help!
-Tim
 
Last edited:
it seems i may have heard of that in the past too. but ive been using drives (and macs) for archiving for about 15 years now and have never "burned in" any of them. and have never had any significant issue with data loss.

what i do recommend and have done is fire them up and run them every year or so.
 
Thanks for the reply, wgzn,

I just fired up my entire archive last night, and (knock on wood) had no failures. I ran OSX > Disk Utility > Verify Disk. I also ran a catalogging utility (CDFinder) on each of the drives to try to give them a little extra spin-up and read.

I have drives going back only about 10 years or so, (drives less than 100GB - imagine that!) and I have had one drive failure about 2 years ago. The drive was 3 years old and just out of warranty. Go figure... Redundancy is key!

I'll post back here if I find a better disk utility for spinning up and reading to verify the data.
 
another thing ive found [in life] is the people who worry, and futz with things are the ones who tend to have problems. dont know if its telekinetic or karma or what. but the more random s**t you throw at something, the more of it will eventually leave a smudge.

and another road wrought with peril is when mac users try to apply behaviors from windows land.

i say dont screw with success. open the drives every year or two. read and write a few random things to them. then put them back on the shelf. and leave the issue alone.

; )
 
Last edited:
Actually, I read you should spin up the drives every 6 months to prevent lock-up.
FWIW
We make it a I-cal reminder.
 
wgzn said:
another thing ive found [in life] is the people who worry, and futz with things are the ones who tend to have problems. dont know if its telekinetic or karma or what. but the more random s**t you throw at something, the more of it will eventually leave a smudge.

and another road wrought with peril is when mac users try to apply behaviors from windows land.

i say dont screw with success. open the drives every year or two. read and write a few random things to them. then put them back on the shelf. and leave the issue alone.

; )
Click to expand...

+100! I love that! I hardly ever had harddrive problems ( after scsi was gone) and was always helping others till I found out they swear at their machines. talk about kharma :)
I also keep 2-3 copies on different drives and check them every now and then.
In scsi days I used to have these tape backups which were a real problem so I stayed away from those ( anybody want some ? they can store up to 4gb on dat size tapes)
I remember my first scsi 1 GB drive cost me 2000 German Marks.....now 1 TB costs 50 bucks.....I might as well do 4 copies on 4 discs and not worry anymore.
 
videoatlanta said:
Actually, I read you should spin up the drives every 6 months to prevent lock-up.
FWIW
We make it a I-cal reminder.
Click to expand...

there once was a faulty micropolis batch from singapore where they saved fractions of pennies by using cheap grease.....the company went chapter 11 because of it. the risk of the grease getting rancid or sticky is still a problem today?
 
I archive to WD Caviars. never had a problem with spin up even after they sat in draw for 1.5 years. For a lot of my stuff i simply keep a few copies of the final dvd/blueray so I dont archive a lot. I don't think i will ever need to re edit a lecture i shot. In most cases i just keep the dvd iso's in a folder on my raid. As for testing a drive prior to using. I normally just start coping my data. if its gonna fail..it gonna fail on the 300gb write. When copying huge files it stresses the drive and it will heat up causing the probability of failure to go up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top