Geek Shit: Get Data from a Dead Desktop 101 + massive data moving gadgets

[grimcity]

Recently, the main computer I use at home died after the processor and motherboard gave up the ghost. Not really a big deal, as the rig is well over six years old, and getting a new cpu and mobo will barely crack a $100 (unless I do some upgrades).

Anyway, the only constraint I had/have rebuilding the machine is time, but I still needed shit from it, so I decided to back up and copy the drives so I can still have immediate use of all of it. Of note, my main machine is a PC, but my second most used machine is a Macbook Pro (though we have about six more machines running and doing different things here).

I figured I'd document what I did in case anyone here finds themselves in a situation where they want to either backup or transport a shit ton of data (especially if you film or download lots of torrents and shit).

First of all, these are two typical types of desktop hard drives, on the left is an IDE drive, and on the right is it's newer kin, the SATA drive.


The hard drives I have in my desktop are SATA, so I needed to grab an external enclosure for it... enclosures come in two styles, either fully enclosed (a case that typically requires a screwdriver, and possibly containing a fan or cooling system), or a slot-style enclosure that looks like a toaster. Most of the hard drive is exposed, but all you have to do is drop the drive in and it's connected. You can also "hot swap" drives, meaning you can yank them out and put other ones in while they're on.

I went to Best Buy and picked up a "BlacX" enclosure from Thermaltake. This is the back of it:

Power on/off, AC adapter jack, USB 2.0 port, and an E-SATA port. Just be aware that the SATA hard drive and the E-SATA port are two different things... one is a type of hard drive that delivers data from itself to the desktop in a quicker way than IDE hard drive, and an E-SATA port is more like a fire wire port on steroids. (BTW, they make identical enclosures for IDE drives that are usually cheaper and easier to find)
In order of speed (typically, slowest to fastest):
USB
USB 2.0
Firewire 400
Firewire 600
Firewire 800
E-SATA

If I was only managing one SATA hard drive, I would have gotten an enclosed case, but I have a few between the ones I own and the ones I manage at work, so something easy to swap was what I needed. The enclosure above was about $50.

One thing I already had here was a 1 terabyte LaCie drive:

Power switch, AC adapter jack, E-SATA port, two firewire 600 ports, and a USB 2.0 port.

With this drive (about $160 on Amazon) I can consolidate all of the data on my other drives, as well as send data to it from my Mac (mostly HD footage). It has dual firewire so you can stream footage directly from the camera to the drive with one port and control it with little lag using the other connected to your computer.

The one thing that both the enclosure and external drive have that the Macbook Pro lacks is an E-SATA port. The laptop has USB 2.0, fw 600 and fw 800, but no E-SATA. However, the laptop does have an express (aka PCI express) card slot, and for $25 you can get a dual-port card:


Note: on the Mac, you need to install drivers for both the LaCie drive and the express card. On a Windows laptop, you really only need to install the drivers for the express card.

This is a photo of a data transfer from one of my old drives, to the express card, then back out to the external drive.

One word of caution, if you're moving a shit ton of data off of a 7200 rpm hard drive and you use a slot enclosure like the one here, put it in front of a fan because the shit gets fucking hot. It's also not a good idea to leave enclosed external hard drives on all night. Fine for a PC that has proper air circulation, but it's really hard to draw heat away from an enclosed drive.

Oh yeah, they also make enclosures for laptop drives. Typically, 2.5" refers to a laptop drive, 3.5" refers to a desktop drive.

Anyway... it was boring, so I figured I'd share that.

[sage]

Maybe I read this wrong, but you were moving data from a HD you had in a PC that died, to an external HD? Why did you need extra hardware to do that, when you could have hooked the HD from the dead PC to any other system that had a free SATA port?

[grimcity]

All my other systems are IDE.

[grimcity]

I just realized that I wasn't properly clear... at home, the rest of my drives are IDE, my main rig was the sole SATA machine, but at work we have a lot of everything, where I'd use the enclosure on smaller stuff, but I have a Drobo and Drobo share (http://www.drobo.com/Products/index.php) on my box at work and some other network storage machines working on redundant RAID setups. We also run tape backups an keep machine profiles remote, basically turning everyone's computer into a virtual machine (if one of my coworkers crashes, we can throw any computer in its place, log them back in the network, and they'll be 100% with no data loss and they'll still have their kittens wallpaper). Anyway, what I mean is that we have enterprise level solutions at work that are too expensive or just too much overkill.

The main goal here was to show some relatively cheap gear that some of the filmer and torrent addicts might find handy, regardless of how its used. I just documented the data backup because some folks assume that when they're computer stops working, all is lost (not counting complete drive failure). I also wanted to introduce E-SATA to people, since most here with a Mac (and many with a PC) are already familiar with Firewire 600/800.

E-SATA is estimated to be about three times faster than FW 800, on paper it's got something like a 3gb throughput.

Two other things I forgot to mention:
1. The slot enclosure that I have pictured (and many like it) will accommodate both 2.5 and 3.5" SATA drives.
2. An alternative layout could have been used in the last photo:
Along with USB and Firewire, E-SATA devices can typically be daisy-chained. Instead of hooking both devices up to the express card, I could have hooked both the external drive and the drive enclosure together via E-SATA, then hooked up either drive to the computer via USB 2 or Firewire... since the data is going from one drive to the other, it wouldn't matter how they're connected to the computer since the computer is simply managing the data transfer of two remote drives.

Sorry for all this, I'm working on a friend's computer as well as my own and posting this stuff is good therapy. heh.

[sage]

I just realized that I wasn't properly clear... at home, the rest of my drives are IDE, my main rig was the sole SATA machine, but at work we have a lot of everything, where I'd use the enclosure on smaller stuff, but I have a Drobo and Drobo share (http://www.drobo.com/Products/index.php) on my box at work and some other network storage machines working on redundant RAID setups. We also run tape backups an keep machine profiles remote, basically turning everyone's computer into a virtual machine (if one of my coworkers crashes, we can throw any computer in its place, log them back in the network, and they'll be 100% with no data loss and they'll still have their kittens wallpaper). Anyway, what I mean is that we have enterprise level solutions at work that are too expensive or just too much overkill.

See now that's pretty cool. My school (and probably most) have the same type of set-up. I can even access my files I have stored in my "h:\" directory from home by logging into their network. I was thinking of trying to set up a 2 disk raid on my computer, since I have a spare HD lying around, but the problem is my spare is only like 60 gigs, so even with no "redundancy" (level 0) the maximum space I could have is the smaller, 60 gig. Might be worth doing just for the experience though.

edit* What i meant to say is twice the smaller drive, so 60 gig X2

This is pretty off-topic from your original post, but speaking of raids you might like this video.

[grimcity]

Fucking sick.

[the whompler]

does anybody know what machines are used for the data recovery process? i've heard it's just software but i can't find ne thing on the subject...

[grimcity]

does anybody know what machines are used for the data recovery process? i've heard it's just software but i can't find ne thing on the subject...

Not really sure, but software won't help if there's a mechanical failure in the drive. If you wanted to be ballsy you could try swapping platters with another identical drive, but the odds of success would be sketchy at best.
If the drive is spinning, you can attach it to another computer as a slave (read the drive for any changes you may need to make on the jumpers) and see if the drive is readable.
Are you sure you have a hard drive failure? What are the symptoms?

[the whompler]

dude i've had the worst luck with hard drives. i've got three that don't work. an internal and two externals. two just skip repetitively and don't show up at all. the other doesn't turn on, and if i can get it to boot it doesn't come up on my computer. i keep them all in separate zip lock bags and was told by a tech friend to keep them in a freezer. and there's way too much porn and pirated music all of them to ever want to get them professionally recovered.

[sage]

keeping them in the freezer sounds like a really stupid idea seeing how there's a good chance condensation will build up and the water could cause a short when you try to turn them on. Plus the fact that it's magnetic storage and freezing them isn't going to magically preserve the data any better then room temperature.

also I don't understand this statement

the other doesn't turn on, and if i can get it to boot it doesn't come up on my computer

[brooklyn brawler]

There's always the hard drive in the sandwich bag in the freezer trick!

[the whompler]

keeping them in the freezer sounds like a really stupid idea seeing how there's a good chance condensation will build up and the water could cause a short when you try to turn them on. Plus the fact that it's magnetic storage and freezing them isn't going to magically preserve the data any better then room temperature.

also I don't understand this statement

Expand Quote

the other doesn't turn on, and if i can get it to boot it doesn't come up on my computer

[close]

haha ya now i just feel like a gullible 11 yr old.  at first i thought the guy was fucking with me but he swore it'd work wonders. but the condensation thing makes more since so i'll prob pull em and not touch em til they've had plenty of time to dry out.

and as far as my statement i'll clarify. i bought a western digi my book tb station. it worked fine for the first month and then after that i'd press the on button and patiently wait but the machine wouldn't respond. from time to time i'd try to turn it on again and once in a blue moon it'd work. but when it would light up to signify that the enclosure was powered up it wouldn't pop up ne where. so ya, pretty sure i'm fucked...