Author Topic: Just lost another HD. are docking stations to blame? (Read 2157 times)

rathoriel · « **on:** April 22, 2012, 02:52:07 PM »

I have lost a few HD reciently and this one may be the worst a 2TB HD that was almost full...I wont know what I lost until i go to look for something i knew i had. I have noticed a trend It is usally the ones I have in a docking station. Has anyone else had experienced this?

boxer4 · « **Reply #1 on:** April 22, 2012, 04:31:17 PM »

The hard drive was internal to a docking station? or attached to the docking station?
Though either way it shouldn't be the docking station unless you didn't properly remove the drive from the machine when you were finished with it (like if you abruptly ejected the machine from the dock)...
No physical damage to the hard drive but may lose data...

datora · « **Reply #2 on:** April 22, 2012, 07:37:10 PM »

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The term "docking station" has several applications. Maybe you could describe more specifically what your situation is? Technology you have and how you use it? Maybe a link to the model of technology in question?

Is this one of those USB/SATA devices that you plug and unplug bare drives into? I'd pretty much never trust one of those unless I used it under exceptionally careful circumstances and was using a very reliable, high-quality brand. Especially I would never hot-swap any drive of mine under anything less than Emergency conditions.

NaRu · « **Reply #3 on:** April 22, 2012, 10:13:37 PM »

Is the docking station powering the HDD through USB or it's own power source (plugs in the wall)?

mgz · « **Reply #4 on:** April 22, 2012, 11:21:44 PM »

all these 1+tb hds are known to have higher failure rates until they improve the technology that is in current HDDs your much better with less then 1tb hdds IMO

And secondly a lot of docking stations that are externally powered have issues with consistency in power to HDD which can fuck with it.

megido-rev.M · « **Reply #5 on:** April 23, 2012, 12:11:41 AM »

We seem to be at an impasse. OP hasn't mentioned the models of said HDs and docking station.

rathoriel · « **Reply #6 on:** April 23, 2012, 12:41:28 AM »

the HD that have died have been 2- 1TB seagates and 1 - 2TB WD Hard Drives as for the docking station

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153112 using USB

I also dont undock them frequently

edit: the seagates were 2 to 3+ years before fail the WD was from august 2011

megido-rev.M · « **Reply #7 on:** April 23, 2012, 01:08:51 AM »

I'm not sure about anyone else, but I am not fond of exposing the drives the way the docking seems to do. There's a huge difference in environments, between keeping a drive in the PC case and leaving it outside. Usually I would say actual enclosures would do you better, but each of those takes a power plug.

Anyway, aside from possible heating/powering problems I'm not sure of what other issues docking a drive would pose.

datora · « **Reply #8 on:** April 23, 2012, 03:24:46 AM »

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There's a good bit of difference in reliability of drive manufacturers. For example, Seagate from more than a year ago sold just about the most horrible large-capacity drives on the planet. Failure rates for 1TB and larger drives by them were not "if" but "when." 3 years of service and you beat the odds by a pretty good spread. I think the Hitachi "DeathStars" were the only model that was clearly worse.

The Western Digital from last year should have been more reliable, where values for "should" have significant variability. It was probably a WD Green drive? Those have been "mostly" reliable for the past two years, but still with significant FAIL rates. I would be stunned if it was a WD Caviar Black drive. Those have been nearly as stable as the bones of the Earth. Yet, we still watch out for earthquakes ...

The dock you linked to is a low-ish to medium end solution. Decent brand name, so I'd have some fair confidence, in general, about it's safety for drives. Caveat: I still don't like docking stations much ... but this one's about as good a bet as any I'd take if I had to. The 2 Amp output seems a bit anemic, especially if I spun up two drives simultaneously ... but it should still have been adequate.

My guess is that the docking station is probably performing about as normally as one is expected to, which is slightly increased risk for several reasons due to design. The drives can be exposed to pollen and fingerprints and cat hair and stuff, plus other mechanical stress from plugging/unplugging. I sure wouldn't hot swap if I could ever avoid it (in fact, have not done it even once in my entire life), but that's me being really paranoid after some devastating data losses in my life. Triple points for large, 1 TB plus drives.

Another thought, though. I run all my electronics off of APC battery back-ups that are plugged into high quality surge suppressors. I KNOW the electricity is very clean and stable running into all my equipment. Plugging directly into raw house current introduces a lot of stress into most electronics because there is always variations in current and other spikes and drops. Every time someone runs a microwave or flips a switch, "noise" is introduced.

Again, triple points for a docking station (or other external hard drive) getting its power from a "dirty" source. In technical terms, we say that is Very Bad for hard drive devices, among others. My speakers and my monitors, for example, I am much more comfortable "only" running them off a top-end surge suppressor, one with capacitors in it to help stabilize & clean up the feed.

AnimeJanai · « **Reply #9 on:** April 27, 2012, 10:29:42 PM »

I have used various external drive cases and was unsatisfied with many (mostly due to their choice of external switching power supplies). Like you, I've lost multiple hard drives (some deliberately, ha ha) not because of intrinsic hard drive failure, but because the external case or its power supply caused the drive to fail.**note_1

The exception to drive failure I noticed came from external docks by Antec. So, over time, the household had become a user of those docks. I used external and internal docks for years (early adopter) and have no problem with them. As with you, the drives are rarely removed. There are several different brands, but I now exclusively use the Antec EZ-DOCK ones for external docks.

Quote from: datora on April 23, 2012, 03:24:46 AM

Another thought, though. I run all my electronics off of APC battery back-ups that are plugged into high quality surge suppressors. I KNOW the electricity is very clean and stable running into all my equipment. Plugging directly into raw house current introduces a lot of stress into most electronics because there is always variations in current and other spikes and drops. Every time someone runs a microwave or flips a switch, "noise" is introduced.[\quote]

I will accept your specific wording and applaud your luck in creating a destructive problem out of your APC branded parts. During testing with resistive load to check output noise ripple and claimed longevity of the UPS, I had connected multiple resistive loads to the APC power strip which was then plugged into the UPS. When the UPS was operating, the APC surge and noise suppressor powerstrip had its output go out of tolerance as well as the powerstrip unit physically vibrating a lot. THEREFORE, this proved that you MUST NOT connect a APC surge and noise suppressor to the output of a consumer-grade UPS. This is because consumer-grade UPS utilize a stepped waveform to emulate the 60 Hertz AC sine-wave. This stepped waveform causes a problem in the filtering section of the APC noise suppression circuit (which uses toroid inductors that end up vibrating wildly).

If you connected your external drives in such an arrangement, they could go bad if the UPS came on.

Quote
Again, triple points for a docking station (or other external hard drive) getting its power from a "dirty" source. In technical terms, we say that is Very Bad for hard drive devices, among others. My speakers and my monitors, for example, I am much more comfortable "only" running them off a top-end surge suppressor, one with capacitors in it to help stabilize & clean up the feed.

The top-end units have both circuitry (integrated circuit or transistorized crowbar) and LC (inductors and capacitors) networks. APC makes multiple types of surge/noise suppressor bars. The ones I have from APC are about two inches thick in order to accommodate the circuitry. Opening the units up you'll find MOVs, electronic circuitry, replaceable fast-blow crowbar fuses, multiple toroid inductors, and multiple capacitors. These were not sold on the normal consumer market (wal-mart, sears, hardware stores), although those models were at Office Depot and stores that sold to businesses. I also use Transtector silicon diode protection since that is the fastest response available. We had thought about using Transtector type devices in a larger breaker panel, but that would have been too expensive and overkill.

Transtector: http://www.protectiongroup.com/Surge/AC-Protectors/Type/AC-Plug-in-Surge-Protectors/SL-V-Surge-Protection

datora · « **Reply #10 on:** April 27, 2012, 11:42:52 PM »

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Apart from getting the quote function pretty messed up ...

It looks like you read what I wrote backwards. I specifically described house current --> high quality surge suppressor --> battery back-up (where I used APC as an example brand name) --> critical electronics (main computing system, external hard drives, router & switches).

I have several fairly high-end surge suppressors that plug directly into my house current. The APC battery back-ups are then plugged into those, not the reverse as you described. I am careful to keep the loads low; in fact, many outlets go unused. Battery back-up is only used for critical components; everything else has only surge-suppression. Items such as secondary monitors, speakers, network & coax cables, phone lines, etc. are plugged directly into the surge suppressor, not added onto the battery load.

Been using this config for over 25 years, and have not had anything go wrong on dozens of systems that have been through 100 or 200 power outages, plus many, many more fluctuations. Friends have used this config with no complaints or losses in all this time. Have worked in data centers and other tech heavy environments, same config & results.

It is outside my imagination that a surge suppressor can possibly affect the power output of a (reputable) battery back-up that's plugged into it. The sheer physics of that should be impossible.

nstgc · « **Reply #11 on:** April 29, 2012, 05:01:27 PM »

So what would you guys suggest? I see the SASD surge protection Transtector SLV, but I can't find it. I also have an external dock, and I also don't like HDD dying on me. I don't buy SG drives (I like Samsung). Also, while I do leave drives in there, I leave the dock unplugged.

Does anyone know anything about the reliablity of the Lian-Li docks? Aside from they're pretty.

[edit]

Would either of these work?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812106005
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812106084

kitamesume · « **Reply #12 on:** May 02, 2012, 04:45:37 AM »

i suggest you make your own docking station through hotswap bays powdered by an intel G530 or something, use a real PSU so there wont be any power problems, the package shouldn't cost too much.

theres another topic about remote controlling a PC without an O/I and monitor, so running the rig headless/monitorless is possible.
Edit: with this setup you just made yourself a torrent rig as well... a bonus i might say.

you could also just purchase a hotswap bay and attach it to the main computer, theres a few [2x5.25 to 3x3.5] hot swap bays @ 75$ in newegg, you can check those out.

jeffmd · « **Reply #13 on:** May 03, 2012, 03:59:24 PM »

rath, you lost 3 hard drives in the same docking station? chuck that thing, its a piece of crap. I would also go with an internal hotswap bay, the power from a good PSU is much much cleaner then a generic external power brick.

bork · « **Reply #14 on:** May 03, 2012, 09:55:07 PM »

put a hot swap bay into the case itself:

http://store.antec.com/Product/accessories-other/easy-sata/0-761345-30750-5.aspx

Sakura90 · « **Reply #15 on:** May 06, 2012, 06:54:18 PM »

Interesting topic. What can I add.... well, I always hot-swap and use drives externally. With my first storage drive I got a Vantec enclosure with eSATA. But as the number of drives increased, I ended up getting a Startech dock for 2 drives. I went with Startech only because the dock provided separate eSATA ports for the drives, the ones from Thermaltake and other generic ones I saw had only one eSATA output for the 2 drives, and I didn't like that

So far so excellent I could say. Been using this dock for 6 months with 5 different drives, which I regularly swap in and out, storing them in nice Betamax cases when not in use (they are great and very sturdy, as expected from something Japanese

). The power brick that came with this Startech dock has 5v and 12v lines, 3A each.

One thing to note, the power grid in this attempt-of-a-country is rather bad, the wall voltage is usually a tad lower than 220v (in summer it can go as low as 170-180, or even lower to the point of not being usable), with frequent surges and occasional power outages (again, more common in summer). Yet I never had a single drive failing or a byte lost/corrupted. I don't know much about power bricks, but this even has a nice hold-up time (or so it seems). With sudden surges when the lights clearly flicker, the drives keep running smoothly. When I had the Vantec enclosure, with those surges you could hear the drive "starting" again.

Anyway, I never had a single prob with this dock, even with lots of hot-swapping. If you let me, I'd like to ask something. Even if I haven't had probs, the instability of the power grid here always worried me. I can't get any expensive equipment as my currency is useless, imports are restricted and even getting money out of this stupid country is complicated. The bare minimum I could do is running the dock from the PSU.

I once did that with the Vantec enclosure (once I noted the drive "restarted" with certain surges), it had a normal plug for 12v, like this

I just wired the yellow and black from a molex and attached a plug at the other end. Easy. It ended up looking like this

But this crappy dock has a 6-pin mini-din

4-6 are ground, 1-2 are 12v and 3-5 are 5v. How can I connect that to my PSU? Only way I see is get a spare connector and cram inside yellow, red and black from a molex (split in two). But that would need soldering I guess... and I'll surely mess up with 6 stupid wires in a plug $:-\$

As I said, I have to go with the cheapest of solutions, as hardware availability here is low and importing/buying stuff in USD is a pain.

nstgc · « **Reply #16 on:** May 08, 2012, 05:56:46 PM »

What I decided to do (since I have cabling problems due to an upside down PSU) is use the spare parts I have laying around to build a secondary computer and use it as a sort of NAS with a cross over cable. Effectively it will be a big ass external enclosure.

bork · « **Reply #17 on:** May 08, 2012, 11:10:36 PM »

You forgot the instructions on how to turn the PS on without a motherboard attached.

Find the green wire on the motherboard connector and jumper it with a wire to ether of the black wires just next to it.

----

Additional after a few minutes of thought:
Because there are those that do not think before acting -- make sure the power cord is removed from the PS and is placed on the other side of the room first. Do not want anyone playing arc welder by trying to connect the wrong wires ether; The PS might rebel and launch a fire ball into your face, the cheaper PS might not have good over-current protection.

AnimeJanai · « **Reply #18 on:** May 19, 2012, 07:16:43 PM »

Quote from: datora on April 27, 2012, 11:42:52 PM

It looks like you read what I wrote backwards. I specifically described house current --> high quality surge suppressor --> battery back-up (where I used APC as an example brand name) --> critical electronics (main computing system, external hard drives, router & switches).

No, I meant it as I said it. It was posted as a caution to not put one of the higher quality surge suppressors after the UPS. Low quality surge suppressors that have only MOV and capacitors are fine. It's the high-quality ones with coils that cause the problem.

bork · « **Reply #19 on:** May 19, 2012, 10:49:48 PM »

On a ups that does not have a sinusoidal waveform, a good surge protector will see squarish wave form as a surge and try to ground it.