Friday, October 1, 2010

Oh Hard Drive, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

Any coincidence it looks a bit like HAL 9000?

Just over a week ago, I decided that my beloved LaCie 400GB Big Disk Extreme external hard drive was ready to be retired. I had come into possession of a gleaming new 1TB LaCie d2 Quadra, and had everything in place to copy the goodies held on "Ol' Trusty" to their new home. I shut down Thursday night, and went to bed with dreams of roomy new storage filling my head.

Apparently, somewhere in the night, the drive must have figured out that it was getting ready to be put out to pasture, and beat me to the punch by quitting before I could fire it.

When I came home from work on Friday evening, and booted up my computer, "Ol' Trusty" turned into "Ol' Busty" and decided it no longer wanted to spin up and talk to my computer anymore. There were no tell-tale grinding sounds, and all the symptoms were similar to a simple power supply failure that I had remedied in the past. Calmly (well, relatively calmly) I ordered a new power supply and hoped against hope that it would be the solution again this time.

Unfortunately, hope failed.

So I took the sucker in to the fine people at MacMedics to see if they could either bring it back to life, or mind meld it onto a younger, healthier drive for me. Unfortunately, I just got the call that it's beyond their capabilities, and I now have to call in the heavy artillery if I want to get back on track. I shudder to think about the monetary output I'm going to have to incur for this, but what can I do? Sure, I could reconstruct my music library, but I don't think I'll be able to pull a "Be Kind, Rewind" style recreation of all the photos that are on that puppy. Guess it's time to get comfy over that barrel.

I wish I had anyone else to blame but me.

As I had already known, and have now had painfully reinforced, I was a damned fool for not having a backup of such a significant amount of valuable data in place to deal with this issue. I'm often somewhat stubborn, but when I've been taught a harsh lesson, I generally tend to be a quick learner, and do what I can to make sure I don't make the same HUGE mistake twice.

Hello Drobo.


Photo credits: Lazurite / Flickr, Emil Erlandsson / Flickr

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