Question Can sudden power loss damage an external hard drive?

[xalaliah]

We are using a 20tb G-RAID Thunderbolt 2 external hard drive (configured with RAID 1) to store weekly backups. Twice now, after a power outage, our backups have failed with I/O errors because they can't write to the drive.
Could power outages be damaging our drive or causing these I/O errors?

 

[Deleted member 14196]

If there are associated power spikes when these outages occur yes

What kind of surge protection do you have them plugged into?

 

[jay32267]

We are using a 20tb G-RAID Thunderbolt 2 external hard drive (configured with RAID 1) to store weekly backups. Twice now, after a power outage, our backups have failed with I/O errors because they can't write to the drive.
Could power outages be damaging our drive or causing these I/O errors?

Yes....as many times an outage is associated with a voltage spike and voltage spikes damage things.

 

[xalaliah]

If there are associated power spikes when these outages occur yes

What kind of surge protection do you have them plugged into?

In all honesty, I can't be too sure. It is plugged into a power strip (a temporarily decision until we get another UPS) and I cannot for sure say that it's also a surge protector. I didn't pay enough attention. As of now, our office is shut down and locked because of the Coronavirus, so I cannot go in and investigate. I believe a few other non-critical devices are plugged into the power strip along with it, but no computers or servers. At the very least, the computer that it's connected to is powered by a UPS and not the power strip. The computers and servers being backed up do so over the network.

EDIT: I talked to a coworker, and he confirmed that the power strip was a surge protector

 

[Deicidium369]

[/QUOTE]
Saga can cause issues as well - just not as obvious as a spike - in which sometime you get some cool sparks and go fast smoke.

In all honesty, I can't be too sure. It is plugged into a power strip (a temporarily decision until we get another UPS) and I cannot for sure say that it's also a surge protector. I didn't pay enough attention. As of now, our office is shut down and locked because of the Coronavirus, so I cannot go in and investigate. I believe a few other non-critical devices are plugged into the power strip along with it, but no computers or servers. At the very least, the computer that it's connected to is powered by a UPS and not the power strip. The computers and servers being backed up do so over the network.

EDIT: I talked to a coworker, and he confirmed that the power strip was a surge protector

Thing about surge protectors - most are junk and not much better than plugging into the wall outlet directly - unless it's an ISOBAR or something beefy. That unit is a surge protector like an extra shirt is like bullet proof body armor.

 

[DSzymborski]

Yes, power outages can caus this damage. Anytime a working disk is forced to shut down instantly, things like this can happen.

Also, RAID is a very poor choice for a backup solution. It's for availability, not integrity. If you need the advantages of a RAID setup, you still need to have a proper backup solution supplementing it.