This Can’t be Happening!

4 April 2009 487 views 3 Comments

Disclaimer: rant ahead with strong language!

What is it with me and external hard drives? All I want is for them to do their frakking job, but no – now my new Seagate Freeagent 1.5TB external drive quit on me! Out of the blue! It’s no even a full two months old; I bought it because one of my original drives died on me and and wanted more backup options. So, this one came home with me and another LaCie drive (1TB). I’ve been backing up faithfully every weekend, but why oh why is this thing broken now?

It only makes faint noises and you can feel it vibrating for a couple of seconds before it goes dead again. And I didn’t do anything! Unfortunately, today is Saturday and the weekly backup run was scheduled for tonight. Which means that this weeks iTunes purchases are going to be lost if I can’t make it work again! House! Hope Floats! Many more songs! Gods damn it!

I am so angry I can’t even put it into words! And the support from the shop I bought it at only works Monday through Friday! Yeah, great! Because I can wait a whole frakking weekend to get to my files; and they will most likely tell me that they will exchange the drive since it still is under warranty, but that my data is lost. That’s so not what I want to hear.

Ok, I am gonna go and start lifting my heaviest books now for about 100 times to vent my aggressive energy because I am short of chucking the drive out the frakking window!

+++Update+++ Lifting books didn’t help. I did some research online and found out that this model is gone for good when it makes those weird noises I was hearing. So, no need to void the warranty and pry it open. I brought it back to the shop, they need to send it in and then Seagate will send me a replacement – which I don’t want, I just want my money back! So, now I am the furious owner of yet another external hard drive. It’s a LaCie MAX, 2.0TB RAID. Now it will take me the rest of this sunny Saturday to get my data from the other drives gathered on the new one.

And no, I won’t whine about the two movie purchases I did this night on iTunes and which have not been backed up yet. I guess there goes another investment. Goddammit.

3 Comments »

klti said:

Your hard disk really seem to hate you. But sse it like that: it can only get better now :mrgreen:

But hard disks can be bitches. The statistics basically say that the probability for disk failure is very high at the beginning and at the end of the normal lifetime of a disk. Especially the beginning part can be quite annoying.

By experience I can say that if you are going to do something other than normal dekstop usage with disks (like daily/nightly backups of tons of data or 24/7 usage), you might wanna pass on the cheapest disks. Normally every vendor has some variants of disks that are less likely to fail (called RAID edition or something like that). They are a bit more expensive, but normally they are worth the money.

The only thing that really helps against data loss is an RAID >= 1. So you might wanna put that RAID disk you bought in RAID 1 mode, because RAID 0 means one disk dies, all data is gone. Frak the capacity, at least it will survive a bit longer.

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Starstuff Reply:
April 4th, 2009 at 4:48 pm

*sigh* Well, the disk that died on me in January was a mere 6 months old and the one that died now was 2 months old. And what do I do with them? They run from about 6pm till midnight while I am home. I don’t think that qualifies as putting too much stress upon it ;)

But I switched the thing to RAID 1 now, so everything is mirrored. And I am preparing another of my LaCie’s to work as an additional mirror – I’ll use the inbuild RAID capability of my iMac Disk Utility to set that up. And I found out there’s this software that’s included with the LaCie disk, it’s called Intego Assistant and it helps to make folder specific backups. So, that should help as well. Of course, only if the frakking disk doesn’t die right after iTunes purchases are downloaded … *argh*…no, I am calm. Totally cool. Below-zero cool.

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# 4 April 2009 at 4:29 pm

AgentSmith said:

The iTunes staff is very nice, just drop them a line and they’ll let you download everything that you lost once more.
For the HDD crap – since I had once experienced a near to complete loss of my complete digital media archive (around 700GB of music, movies and tv shows, _each single file_ tagged by hand with all my finest caring) I now only buy new storage units in a twin pack. Costs more, is annoying as shit and consumes time – but I sleep better. The really important stuff is even stored on twin packs of RAID 1 units.. and regularly uploaded in an encrypted container to my webserver.

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# 4 April 2009 at 4:58 pm