(A ramble)

I hate it when hard drives fail. It's not just the potential loss of
data - even with the best of backup plans, there's always a risk of
that - but there's the annoying inconvenience of restoring all that
data. Even with SATA3, it takes hours to restore hundreds of gigabytes
of data... and most of the time I'm not restoring from anything as
fast as SATA3.

I didn't think it was a hard-disk failure at first. Or rather, I did,
but all the evidence seemed to suggest otherwise. I wasn't seeing lost
data; rather, I'd get these random temporary lock-ups of one or two
seconds... usually when playing a game, but occasionally while
working. These sort of freeze is indicative of hard-disk problems
(either that or some rogue networking app pinging a dog-slow server)
but I checked the affected drives, and nothing. No SMART errors,
ChkDsk (Windows) and Fsck (Linux) were both happy, and nothing showed
up on more intensive disk-check-up programs.

I checked my main boot SSD drive, my primary "fastgames" SSD where
Steam resides, and the slower HDD where I stash my data and some
legacy games (like "Eurotruck Simulator 2", which was where the
problem was most noticeable, probably because of how it streams in
data). The symptoms screamed "disk problem" but there was no evidence
for it, so I searched in vain for other problems. Some memory-hogging
app? A bad configuration setting? Some spyware that had snuck its way
onto the computer? I was even wondering if I'd somehow managed to get
a UEFI-infecting rootkit.

It wasn't any of these things, of course. It was a bad hard-drive...
but I'd checked for that, right? Well, yes... and no. See, I checked
the drives which were serving up data while I was working or gaming.
But there was a fourth drive in the system too. But I didn't bother to
scan that drive; why should I? All it had on it was old archived data
and some DOS games. I never accessed it except when I wanted to fire
up "Master of Orion" or something, and whenever I did, everything was
fine. If there was a problem, it had to be on one of the drives that
were being actively polled while I was running those programs, and my
old "slowdrives" spinning-rust hard-drive wasn't involved in any of
that.

But it turns out Windows wasn't quite as hands-off (even though the
fact that it was polling the drive almost never showed up in resource
monitor, and the reported response times were nominal. And the SMART
diagnostics showed no problems... which only confirms how useless
SMART diagnostic software built into hard drives really is). But
running a full disk scan found bad clusters... lots and lots of 'em.

I yanked the drive immediately, of course. Fortunately, I have backups
but nothing on that drive was irreplaceable anyway. Rebooting with the
drive unplugged, the PC ran without issue. "Eurotruck Simulator 2"
was buttery smooth once again, hurrah! I pulled out a spare HDD, gave
it a thorough scan for bad clusters, and - even as I type this - am
copying data from the back-up over to it (over USB, <sigh>... it
should be done in another 40 hours :-/). After that, it'll get one
more check-up, and then I'll plug it into the main PC. It's not a
major inconvenience (although no DOS games for me until its done!),
especially since I have the restore running on another computer, but
what an unnecessary and unwanted bother.

It could have been worse, of course. I might have had to replace a
system drive; that's always annoying (so many apps to reinstall! so
many tweaks to get the PC running just how I like it!). Restoring an
old data drive is nothing in comparison.

And, anyway, I get some joy in knowing my original instincts as to the
source of the problem were correct... even if I did go about proving
them right in an ass-backwards way that caused me more frustration
than needed. So there's that.

But at least it wasn't a UEFI bootkit ;-)

>I hate it when hard drives fail.
I've never had this happen, like ever. Well, a Crucial M4 SSD did fail
to boot on me once, but that was a known issue that I looked up the
semi-scary recovery procedure for (which involved power-cycling and
unplugging) and putting on a new firmware for it. But other than that,
never.

My only drives now are a 2TB 980pro nvme & 4TB HGST, with a duplicate 4TB
HGST in the closet. It takes at least 24hrs, probably longer, to clone 4TB,
which is definitely keeping me from buying anything larger at the moment (I
have zero desire or real need for a NAS). If I keep ripping movies as I
have been I can definitely see needing more; I'm just hoping giant SSDs get
cheaper I guess, shrug! Your post is jolting me a bit though, I'll likely
buy a cheap USB 5TB backup drive.

rms

Lawn mowing simulator!

--
Zag

No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten

On 7/28/2022 10:45 AM, rms wrote:
>> I hate it when hard drives fail.
>   I've never had this happen, like ever.  Well, a Crucial M4 SSD did
> fail to boot on me once, but that was a known issue that I looked up the
> semi-scary recovery procedure for (which involved power-cycling and
> unplugging) and putting on a new firmware for it.  But other than that,
> never.
>
> My only drives now are a 2TB 980pro nvme & 4TB HGST, with a duplicate
> 4TB HGST in the closet.  It takes at least 24hrs, probably longer, to
> clone 4TB, which is definitely keeping me from buying anything larger at
> the moment (I have zero desire or real need for a NAS).  If I keep
> ripping movies as I have been I can definitely see needing more; I'm
> just hoping giant SSDs get cheaper I guess, shrug!  Your post is jolting
> me a bit though, I'll likely buy a cheap USB 5TB backup drive.
>
I did manage to acquire a 5TB external SSD drive a few months ago for
~$100, but that was partially because it was on sale.

I've had one, possibly two drives die on me. One was an external
"spinning rust" that got dropped. (Oops!) It was used for image
storage. Lost about 2/3rds of the contents that couldn't be recovered.
The other was possibly the internal boot drive of an old PC. The
machine wouldn't boot one morning and I never did figure out exactly
what happened or why. It was old at the time so I replaced entirely.

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On Thu, 28 Jul 2022 11:45:10 -0600, "rms"
<rsquiresMOO@MOOflashMOO.net> wrote:

>>I hate it when hard drives fail.
> I've never had this happen, like ever. Well, a Crucial M4 SSD did fail
>to boot on me once, but that was a known issue that I looked up the
>semi-scary recovery procedure for (which involved power-cycling and
>unplugging) and putting on a new firmware for it. But other than that,
>never.

Hard drives die; it's a fact of life with computers. If you work with
PCs long enough - or just have lots of computers - you're going to
experience it eventually.

This particular hard-drive was probably past due; it had - prior to
being plugged into the computer - served as as external back-up for
years. It's quite possibly had over a decade of constant service; I'm
not surprised that it finally developed issues. Still, it's likely
that it lasted longer than any of my SSDs ever will, which is why I
still use spinning-rust around for less speed-critical files.

I honestly should have suspected the drive earlier, except - as
mentioned - it wasn't serving up any files whenever the stuttering
showed up so I discounted its influence. Plus, it gets so rarely used
that I half-forgot it was even there. And - as mentioned - SMART
diagnostics gave the drive a thumbs-up.

Well, so it goes. The current disk-copy is about halfway done as I
type this (it's transferring from one USB enclosure to another; it was
easier - and quieter! - for me to use USB rather than fire up the PC
with the hotswappable SATA drive bays. Even with USB 3, it's much
slower this way, but there's no rush.)

I don't think I have ever lost a hard drive Spalls. Maybe back in the
IBM DOS or Win 3.1 but I can't remember.

Sorry about that!

-pw

On Thu, 28 Jul 2022 21:34:26 -0600, PW
<iamnotusingonewithAgent@notinuse.com> wrote:

>I don't think I have ever lost a hard drive Spalls. Maybe back in the
>IBM DOS or Win 3.1 but I can't remember.

I lost an external HD once but that was it for me as far as hard
drives go I think.

I also had a CPU fan, a mouse and a video card die on me over the
years.

I read your post, and looked at my 7 installed external drives.
I have more than that but these 7 are on my USB hub..although
two were not turned on.
I did lose a WD external drive years ago, but none since, so after
I read your post I turned on my smaller WD external drive.
Nothing happened.
The power light lit, but the drive would not spin up. And
I tried tapping it on the side, but nothing. After many attempts, it's
now in the trashcan with the cables.
I think it was on the way out, or had already died, as the
power light started to flicker when I turned on my computer,
although the drive was not powered up.
It was old, and fairly small...just several hundred megs..
but like an idiot I hadn't backed it up! And I got tons of
blank double layer DVDs sitting right next to me.
Was just music on there...probably most of it
from Napster.
Next step is to get a blu-ray burner.
I learned my lesson after decades of not using
any backups.

>Pianoman

On Wed, 27 Jul 2022 23:09:41 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>(A ramble)
>
>I hate it when hard drives fail. It's not just the potential loss of
>data - even with the best of backup plans, there's always a risk of
>that - but there's the annoying inconvenience of restoring all that
>data. Even with SATA3, it takes hours to restore hundreds of gigabytes
>of data... and most of the time I'm not restoring from anything as
>fast as SATA3.
>
>I didn't think it was a hard-disk failure at first. Or rather, I did,
>but all the evidence seemed to suggest otherwise. I wasn't seeing lost
>data; rather, I'd get these random temporary lock-ups of one or two
>seconds... usually when playing a game, but occasionally while
>working. These sort of freeze is indicative of hard-disk problems
>(either that or some rogue networking app pinging a dog-slow server)
>but I checked the affected drives, and nothing. No SMART errors,
>ChkDsk (Windows) and Fsck (Linux) were both happy, and nothing showed
>up on more intensive disk-check-up programs.
>
>I checked my main boot SSD drive, my primary "fastgames" SSD where
>Steam resides, and the slower HDD where I stash my data and some
>legacy games (like "Eurotruck Simulator 2", which was where the
>problem was most noticeable, probably because of how it streams in
>data). The symptoms screamed "disk problem" but there was no evidence
>for it, so I searched in vain for other problems. Some memory-hogging
>app? A bad configuration setting? Some spyware that had snuck its way
>onto the computer? I was even wondering if I'd somehow managed to get
>a UEFI-infecting rootkit.
>
>It wasn't any of these things, of course. It was a bad hard-drive...
>but I'd checked for that, right? Well, yes... and no. See, I checked
>the drives which were serving up data while I was working or gaming.
>But there was a fourth drive in the system too. But I didn't bother to
>scan that drive; why should I? All it had on it was old archived data
>and some DOS games. I never accessed it except when I wanted to fire
>up "Master of Orion" or something, and whenever I did, everything was
>fine. If there was a problem, it had to be on one of the drives that
>were being actively polled while I was running those programs, and my
>old "slowdrives" spinning-rust hard-drive wasn't involved in any of
>that.
>
>But it turns out Windows wasn't quite as hands-off (even though the
>fact that it was polling the drive almost never showed up in resource
>monitor, and the reported response times were nominal. And the SMART
>diagnostics showed no problems... which only confirms how useless
>SMART diagnostic software built into hard drives really is). But
>running a full disk scan found bad clusters... lots and lots of 'em.
>
>I yanked the drive immediately, of course. Fortunately, I have backups
>but nothing on that drive was irreplaceable anyway. Rebooting with the
>drive unplugged, the PC ran without issue. "Eurotruck Simulator 2"
>was buttery smooth once again, hurrah! I pulled out a spare HDD, gave
>it a thorough scan for bad clusters, and - even as I type this - am
>copying data from the back-up over to it (over USB, <sigh>... it
>should be done in another 40 hours :-/). After that, it'll get one
>more check-up, and then I'll plug it into the main PC. It's not a
>major inconvenience (although no DOS games for me until its done!),
>especially since I have the restore running on another computer, but
>what an unnecessary and unwanted bother.
>
>It could have been worse, of course. I might have had to replace a
>system drive; that's always annoying (so many apps to reinstall! so
>many tweaks to get the PC running just how I like it!). Restoring an
>old data drive is nothing in comparison.
>
>And, anyway, I get some joy in knowing my original instincts as to the
>source of the problem were correct... even if I did go about proving
>them right in an ass-backwards way that caused me more frustration
>than needed. So there's that.
>
>But at least it wasn't a UEFI bootkit ;-)
>
>
>
>
>
>

Things I've had die on me.

- A PSU which made a large pooping sound and a cloud of acrid smoke
appeared.
- A harddrive that really was long past its sell by date and was slowing
my system down. It produced a sound like metal on metal and promptly died.
- Graphics card, stated producing horribly screen fragments.
- PSU, that one just became unreliable and it would have been nicer if
it actually just died as I ended up replacing the MB + CPU + RAM.
- Yet another PSU but that was my own fault. I disconnected the
displayport cable only to realise that I hadn't screwed in the GPU.
Luckily nothing else was damaged.

On Sun, 31 Jul 2022 11:37:46 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

>Things I've had die on me.
>
>- A PSU which made a large pooping sound and a cloud of acrid smoke
>appeared.
>- A harddrive that really was long past its sell by date and was slowing
>my system down. It produced a sound like metal on metal and promptly died.
>- Graphics card, stated producing horribly screen fragments.
>- PSU, that one just became unreliable and it would have been nicer if
>it actually just died as I ended up replacing the MB + CPU + RAM.
>- Yet another PSU but that was my own fault. I disconnected the
>displayport cable only to realise that I hadn't screwed in the GPU.
>Luckily nothing else was damaged.

That is a lot of power supply deaths.

Your post reminded me that I need to add a PSU to my deaths. It was
actually the very last thing that died on me about three years ago.
That is when I finally got a new computer. That PSU (and computer)
worked for over 11 years though so I am not complaining. I needed a
faster computer anyway. Replacing the PSU in the old computer was not
worth it.

On 7/31/2022 3:37 AM, JAB wrote:
> Things I've had die on me.
>
> - A PSU which made a large pooping sound and a cloud of acrid smoke
> appeared.
> - A harddrive that really was long past its sell by date and was slowing
> my system down. It produced a sound like metal on metal and promptly died.
> - Graphics card, stated producing horribly screen fragments.
> - PSU, that one just became unreliable and it would have been nicer if
> it actually just died as I ended up replacing the MB + CPU + RAM.
> - Yet another PSU but that was my own fault. I disconnected the
> displayport cable only to realise that I hadn't screwed in the GPU.
> Luckily nothing else was damaged.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On Wed, 27 Jul 2022 23:09:41 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>But it turns out Windows wasn't quite as hands-off (even though the
>fact that it was polling the drive almost never showed up in resource
>monitor, and the reported response times were nominal. And the SMART
>diagnostics showed no problems... which only confirms how useless
>SMART diagnostic software built into hard drives really is). But
>running a full disk scan found bad clusters... lots and lots of 'em.

I'm not sure that's a valid conclusion about SMART, and would say the
same about any self-monitoring diagnostic solution for any type of
system.

The idea behind SMART is for the hard drive to be able to detect
certain types of warning signs, it's not meant to be the last word in
whether or not a hard drive is about to fail or has issues.

In most systems (of any type), self-monitoring diagnostics is usually
best viewed as supplemental in nature. There should be more than one
way to detect problems, because methods of detection themselves can
fail or have flaws that only reveal themselves in certain contexts.

That being said, almost every Crucual SSD I've ever owned started
throwing SMART errors after 2-3 years, and none of the Samsung units
have done same. Maybe it's that Samsung has rigged their gear not to
report SMART errors? :) But I also have not had a Samsung drive
fail yet, so for that reason I am not purchasing any more Crucial
SSDs.

On 31/07/2022 11:53, Mike S. wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Jul 2022 11:37:46 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
>
>> Things I've had die on me.
>>
>> - A PSU which made a large pooping sound and a cloud of acrid smoke
>> appeared.
>> - A harddrive that really was long past its sell by date and was slowing
>> my system down. It produced a sound like metal on metal and promptly died.
>> - Graphics card, stated producing horribly screen fragments.
>> - PSU, that one just became unreliable and it would have been nicer if
>> it actually just died as I ended up replacing the MB + CPU + RAM.
>> - Yet another PSU but that was my own fault. I disconnected the
>> displayport cable only to realise that I hadn't screwed in the GPU.
>> Luckily nothing else was damaged.
>
> That is a lot of power supply deaths.
>
> Your post reminded me that I need to add a PSU to my deaths. It was
> actually the very last thing that died on me about three years ago.
> That is when I finally got a new computer. That PSU (and computer)
> worked for over 11 years though so I am not complaining. I needed a
> faster computer anyway. Replacing the PSU in the old computer was not
> worth it.

Even the first one was kinda my fault as I didn't follow my rule of it
seems to cheap there's a reason for that and the reason is probably it's
crap my next one I thought lets go back to get something that's at least
decent and that lasted probably eight years before finally failing.

Saying that even the rule of going for at least decent doesn't always
work. SO both my Samsung TV and monitor both started failing after about
four years and you had had to let them 'warm up up quite a few minutes'
before you'd get a proper picture and it only got worse as time
progressed. Looking into it it turns outs it was a design flaw with some
of the caps. Since then I've bought a new monitor (AOC) and two new TV's
(LG). That's how you lose a customer.

On Sunday, July 31, 2022 at 3:37:51 AM UTC-7, JAB wrote:
> Things I've had die on me.
>
> - A PSU which made a large pooping sound and a cloud of acrid smoke
> appeared.
> - A harddrive that really was long past its sell by date and was slowing
> my system down. It produced a sound like metal on metal and promptly died.
> - Graphics card, stated producing horribly screen fragments.
> - PSU, that one just became unreliable and it would have been nicer if
> it actually just died as I ended up replacing the MB + CPU + RAM.
> - Yet another PSU but that was my own fault. I disconnected the
> displayport cable only to realise that I hadn't screwed in the GPU.
> Luckily nothing else was damaged.

I've had a number of drives die on me, probably about 4, a couple I caught in
time and a couple just died, at least one stiction. All rust. I have had a couple
thumb drives go bad on me though. I personally haven't had an SSD go bad,
but I saw a lot of them in the early days of SSDs that did at work, and when
they go, they're impossible to recover from.

I can't say for sure on anything else, as it could've been a poor PSU or it
could've been the cards, motherboards, CPU, bad heatsink connection to the
CPU etc. should be able to rule out windows as I had reimaged it. I never
completely tracked it down for sure even after replacing everything, and
ended up replacing everything again, and again. My current computer
counting the PSU and MB is the most stable I've ever had.

My son's computer isn't very stable, but it's made up of about half of my own
old parts and parts from an old Lenovo desktop a relative upgraded from,
and he's installed questionable things on it repeatedly even after I've
wiped it a couple times due to the stuff making it crash and slow down a lot.
Currently it keeps losing the wifi, I had a wifi card in it but he broke the antenna
so I figured that was the problem, bought a USB wifi of the same type I have
as that's worked well for me, but it keeps disconnecting, and have to unplug
and plug it back in.

- Justisaur

JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
> On 31/07/2022 11:53, Mike S. wrote:
> > On Sun, 31 Jul 2022 11:37:46 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Things I've had die on me.
> >>
> >> - A PSU which made a large pooping sound and a cloud of acrid smoke
> >> appeared.
> >> - A harddrive that really was long past its sell by date and was slowing
> >> my system down. It produced a sound like metal on metal and promptly died.
> >> - Graphics card, stated producing horribly screen fragments.
> >> - PSU, that one just became unreliable and it would have been nicer if
> >> it actually just died as I ended up replacing the MB + CPU + RAM.
> >> - Yet another PSU but that was my own fault. I disconnected the
> >> displayport cable only to realise that I hadn't screwed in the GPU.
> >> Luckily nothing else was damaged.
> >
> > That is a lot of power supply deaths.
> >
> > Your post reminded me that I need to add a PSU to my deaths. It was
> > actually the very last thing that died on me about three years ago.
> > That is when I finally got a new computer. That PSU (and computer)
> > worked for over 11 years though so I am not complaining. I needed a
> > faster computer anyway. Replacing the PSU in the old computer was not
> > worth it.

> Even the first one was kinda my fault as I didn't follow my rule of it
> seems to cheap there's a reason for that and the reason is probably it's
> crap my next one I thought lets go back to get something that's at least
> decent and that lasted probably eight years before finally failing.

Were those PSU cheap brands or good brands like SeaSonic? I have had
cheap PSUs go bad and killing my hardwares. :( I have had good brands
blow up, but didn't kill my hardwares.

--
Dang old bodies and their aches and tiredness. :(
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org.
/ /\ /\ \ Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail.
| |o o| |
\ _ /
( )

On Sat, 30 Jul 2022 20:26:19 -0400, Alan D Ray <nalayar@sccoast.net>
wrote:

>I read your post, and looked at my 7 installed external drives.
>I have more than that but these 7 are on my USB hub..although
>two were not turned on.
>I did lose a WD external drive years ago, but none since, so after
>I read your post I turned on my smaller WD external drive.
>Nothing happened.
>The power light lit, but the drive would not spin up. And
>I tried tapping it on the side, but nothing. After many attempts, it's
>now in the trashcan with the cables.
>I think it was on the way out, or had already died, as the
>power light started to flicker when I turned on my computer,
>although the drive was not powered up.
>It was old, and fairly small...just several hundred megs..
>but like an idiot I hadn't backed it up! And I got tons of
>blank double layer DVDs sitting right next to me.
>Was just music on there...probably most of it
>from Napster.
>Next step is to get a blu-ray burner.
>I learned my lesson after decades of not using
>any backups.

Everyone - myself included - only /really/ learns the importance of
backups after losing data due to not having a backup. Until then,
nobody bothers ;-)

Ideally, the data should be stored in at least three places, in at
least two different locations and on two different mediums (so,
original, locally backed up to hard-drive, and then an online back-up
system. Traditionally this latter was an offsite back-up to tape, but
these days you can use a third-party like OneDrive or something.

I can't imagine backing up to optical media anymore, though. Even
BluRay only holds 50GB or so, and burn speeds make my transfer over
USB look relativistic in comparison.

Meanwhile, my transfer continues. It would have finished long ago, but
I forgot to properly set the partition alignment correctly. Then,
after I corrected that and restarted, I noticed I'd made another
stupid mistake. Then I got tired of the whole thing and in frustration
with my stupidity, shut down the computer for the rest of the day
rather. Anyway, the ETA for the completion of this third attempt -
assuming I haven't fucked up something else - is in about eight hours.

Largely because I don't have access to them anymore, I've been
/really/ wanting to play my DOS games. You always want what you can't
have. Well, I am sure that urge will go away once the drive gets
reinstalled ;-)

On 31/07/2022 17:26, Ant wrote:
> Were those PSU cheap brands or good brands like SeaSonic? I have had
> cheap PSUs go bad and killing my hardwares. :( I have had good brands
> blow up, but didn't kill my hardwares.
>

The first one that died in less than a year, haven't got a clue what the
brand was. The next one that lasted eight years on so, X power or
something possibly, can't remember. The last one, which I killed, that
was an EVGA.

On Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at 9:09:57 PM UTC-6, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> (A ramble)
>
> Even with SATA3, it takes hours to restore hundreds of gigabytes
> of data... and most of the time I'm not restoring from anything as
> fast as SATA3.

What recovery methods do you use? I have Macrium Reflect make an image of my 1 TB boot drive and 2 TB utility drive every Monday/Tuesday. Both are using about the same amount of storage so it takes about 30-45 minutes to make the image but restoring the image is only like 30 minutes.

On Sun, 31 Jul 2022 21:47:23 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

>On 31/07/2022 17:26, Ant wrote:
>> Were those PSU cheap brands or good brands like SeaSonic? I have had
>> cheap PSUs go bad and killing my hardwares. :( I have had good brands
>> blow up, but didn't kill my hardwares.

>The first one that died in less than a year, haven't got a clue what the
>brand was. The next one that lasted eight years on so, X power or
>something possibly, can't remember. The last one, which I killed, that
>was an EVGA.

I don't like talking about past hardware failures. It just gives the
working stuff ideas ;-)

Especially power supplies. A bad PSU can wreak havoc on your machine
if you're particularly unlucky.

Now, excuse me while I go back to stroking my lucky rabbit's foot,
which I'm sure has the same efficiacy in preventing hardware failures
as not talking about the issue ;-)

Remember that dead hard drive I had a few weeks back? Yeah, me
neither. I replaced it, restored the backup, and went on to do more
'productive' things with my life. The end, case closed, everybody
lives happily ever after.

Except then, for shits-n-giggles, I decided to look at the drive again
(virtually) and... well, have you ever seen a hard-drive with 99%
fragmentation? (do you even remember how old hard drives need to be
defragmented?). Neither have I until yesterday. Every file (minus the
invisible stuff Windows puts onto the drive) managed to splinter
itself into multiple parts across the drive. /EVERY SINGLE ONE/. Many
with more than 100,000 fragments. I dunno, I found that a bit
impressive.

(I know why it happened. The restore used multiple streams to copy the
data over. It's faster but stupidly just drops the data into the next
available cluster rather than first claiming a bunch of consecutive
sectors and filling those in. Use a stupid tool, get a stupid result).

The drive itself is only used for storing data and really old DOS
games; any slow-downs caused by the fragmented file structure will be
inconsequential in actual use. And while the files /are/ fragmented,
those clusters used in each individual file tend to be fragmented
close together, so it's not like the head will be skidding all over
the drive trying to read the data. There's really no need to
defragment this drive...

.... not that it will stop me. All those blocks showing up in
'red=fragmented' on my disk tool? We can't have that!

<two days later>

Ah. Totally worth it. ;-)

Except now I sorta miss having a drive with an impressive 99%
fragmentation.

On 8/13/2022 8:31 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> Remember that dead hard drive I had a few weeks back? Yeah, me
> neither. I replaced it, restored the backup, and went on to do more
> 'productive' things with my life. The end, case closed, everybody
> lives happily ever after.
>
> Except then, for shits-n-giggles, I decided to look at the drive again
> (virtually) and... well, have you ever seen a hard-drive with 99%
> fragmentation? (do you even remember how old hard drives need to be
> defragmented?). Neither have I until yesterday. Every file (minus the
> invisible stuff Windows puts onto the drive) managed to splinter
> itself into multiple parts across the drive. /EVERY SINGLE ONE/. Many
> with more than 100,000 fragments. I dunno, I found that a bit
> impressive.
>
> (I know why it happened. The restore used multiple streams to copy the
> data over. It's faster but stupidly just drops the data into the next
> available cluster rather than first claiming a bunch of consecutive
> sectors and filling those in. Use a stupid tool, get a stupid result).
>
> The drive itself is only used for storing data and really old DOS
> games; any slow-downs caused by the fragmented file structure will be
> inconsequential in actual use. And while the files /are/ fragmented,
> those clusters used in each individual file tend to be fragmented
> close together, so it's not like the head will be skidding all over
> the drive trying to read the data. There's really no need to
> defragment this drive...
>
> ... not that it will stop me. All those blocks showing up in
> 'red=fragmented' on my disk tool? We can't have that!
>
> <two days later>
>
> Ah. Totally worth it. ;-)
>
> Except now I sorta miss having a drive with an impressive 99%
> fragmentation.
>
You could always "restore" it again on another physical drive. Then you
would have a clean drive and a dirty drive to feel warm and fuzzy about. :)

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On Sat, 13 Aug 2022 09:42:23 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

>On 8/13/2022 8:31 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>> Except now I sorta miss having a drive with an impressive 99%
>> fragmentation.

>You could always "restore" it again on another physical drive. Then you
>would have a clean drive and a dirty drive to feel warm and fuzzy about. :)

It says something about me that I'm actually tempted by that option.

It says something entirely different about me that I have enough spare
hardware lying about I could actually /do/ what you suggest.

;-)

On 8/13/2022 4:12 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Aug 2022 09:42:23 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
> <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:
>
>> On 8/13/2022 8:31 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>>> Except now I sorta miss having a drive with an impressive 99%
>>> fragmentation.
>
>> You could always "restore" it again on another physical drive. Then you
>> would have a clean drive and a dirty drive to feel warm and fuzzy about. :)
>
> It says something about me that I'm actually tempted by that option.
>
> It says something entirely different about me that I have enough spare
> hardware lying about I could actually /do/ what you suggest.
>
> ;-)
>
No, both things say the exact same thing. Scream it actually. NERD!!! :p

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.