Yes, THREW. I heard a thud as it hit my door and it was loud enough to get my dog barking.
Thanks delivery person, very cool. I hope that when someone else is delivering your expensive fragile items, they’re gentle with it so you don’t have to go through the anxiety of not knowing whether the hard drive you bought SPECIFICALLY as a long term offline backup might be damaged and unreliable before a single file has been backed up to it.
Like, if it was straight up broken after this, that would be preferable because if it breaks in a year or so, not only do you lose your data (potentially finding out only after your server’s main drive also broke and you’re trying to recover from your backup), and the website won’t refund you because they won’t believe that it broke because the person who delivered it mishandled it.
So again, thank you delivery person for making my digital life that much spicier for no reason. Hope you enjoyed those extra two seconds you saved knowing it’s not your hard drive or data. Also thank you for not even ringing my doorbell presumably because you didn’t want to be confronted by the new owner of the product you potentially broke. Or maybe you wanted to give the package thieves a fair chance at getting it before I did.
Incidentally, does anyone know how I can check the drive for potential damage? I’m currently doing a SMART long test which says it will take over 24 hours. How good is SMART at detecting physical damage as opposed to the drive aging?
Why aren’t you running your drives in a RAID array? RAID 5 is n-1, meaning you get n-1 total storage space and can withstand any 1 drive failing. You do need at least 3 drives, but that’s what you should be doing - not just running a manual mirror backup or whatever. You also get the speed advantage from striping data across the drives (although this speed is nothing to an SSD).
If you really want to be serious about backing up then it’s 3,2,1 - 3 copies, on 2 different types of media, with 1 in an off-site location. As a minimum.
But first off I think you should upgrade your long-term backup to have some kind of RAID array. With 2 drives you can do RAID 10 (RAID 0 and RAID 1 combined), you’ll only get the storage of 1 drive but you’ll have one to one redundancy and striping. With 3 or more drives do RAID 5 so you’ll have more storage (eg 3x 8GB drives would give 16GB, 4x 8GB would be 24GB, etc), striping for speed, and also the same n-1 redundancy.
You may need a PCIe card for RAID 5, not all motherboards support it natively. You should be able to find a decent one for not too much, if you look around. RAID 1 and 0 (and maybe 10) often are supported natively.
You should not be using Fake RAID (AKA BIOS RAID) at all. It’s software RAID, implemented by the drivers. The only advantage is that it’s sometimes easier to setup in the first place by someone inexperienced.
If you’re going to use software RAID, just do it through the OS.
Also, this does not answer OP’s concerns in the slightest.
Having a RAID array would make OP’s question somewhat moot - because a drive failure would be less significant.
You and others are focusing on addressing the likelihood of the risk. I’m saying it would be better to address the severity instead. The comment is relevant, just slightly more abstract, but very much on topic.
You’re right that motherboard RAID is worse than OS RAID. I just wasn’t sure what OP’s backup device actually is, if it’s a PC or some simple bespoke NAS box. But it’s more Hardware Controller > OS > Motherboard, generally speaking.