Hard Drive Crashed, D’oh!

Posted in Real World, Technology

In a surprising chapter of events (or not so surprising, given how perfectly working things tend to fall apart on me all the time), my main desktop’s hard drive crashed on 4/4/08. It was a three-year-old Western Digital 160 GB 8 MB cache IDE hard drive, originally purchased for well over $150. At the time of purchase, it was one of the best available. Of course, it’s obsolete by today’s technology standards, and pretty much one of the only bottlenecks of my otherwise fast system (which I’ll cover shortly). I just never got around to upgrading the drive to something faster or bigger. Too much data, too much software, too much random stuff to potentially lose. Yeah, I could’ve backed everything up on a few DVDs. I could’ve done a lot of things to ease the transition from IDE to SATA. But I don’t like change. And I definitely don’t like surprises.

Well, I came home late Friday night expecting to turn on my LCD monitor and see a flood of AIM windows all over my desktop, as common when I leave for a period of time equal to or greater than 2 hours. Instead, I was surprised to find that my desktop was shut down. Yes, the system was OFF. Now for me, that’s a kinda big deal. My uptime has been nearly six months without a single restart or shut down on this particular rig (only restarted once to apply driver updates/BIOS tweaks). I have surge protectors, backup generators, etc, which keep my system protected and running. And I don’t have any applications that auto-update-restart ala Windows Update. So…

A quick detail about the rig: it sports an Intel Pentium 4 561 3.60 GHz running at a whooping 4.65 GHz. It’s been overclocked at that speed for nearly two years non-stop, up 24/7/365. Once upon a time, when I created/owned a phase change setup utilizing R134a HVAC gas, I was capable of overclocking this beast of a CPU to 5.4 GHz STABLE (that’s right folks, Super-PI stable, not just POST). Anyways, my point is, this was a heck of a solid setup I had, and a fast one at that. Considering I haven’t upgraded to any of the Core Duo/Quad mumbo-jumbo yet, I’d say I did a damn good job of keeping up with technology without buying new crap every year. I just tack on a few more MHz and call it a day.

Back to my story. I turned on my system and, much to my dismay, I heard five loud “clunking” sounds coming from my hard drive, followed by pause, followed by another set of clunking sounds, etc. Great. Clunking sounds are the universal “you’re screwed” noise that hard drives make. All jokes aside, the clunking sound I am referring to is the sound of the platters/head hitting each other. Somehow my hard drive managed to commit-suicide, as there was definitely no physical shock to the system.

My options at this point are limited. The only way to salvage the data is to submit it to a 3rd-party hard drive recovery facility, where they charge up-the-a$$ (I’m talking thousands of USD) to retrieve maybe a single Word document. So, that’s not gonna happen. All my 10,000 important emails I had downloaded to Outlook? Gone. Contracts, proposals, hand-coded websites, and hundreds of other Word documents? Gone! Gigabytes upon gigabytes of downloaded music, movies, and games? GONE! I don’t really care for the latter, because to me, the emails and documents, not to mention the many, MANY work-in-progress website projects (which I spent hundreds of man hours on), was an extremely monumental loss.

So here I am now. I’ve learned my lesson. I bought two new 500 GB SATA II drives, which are currently running in RAID 0, but I plan to switch things up to RAID 1 when I get the chance to go into the BIOS and reformat my drives (accidentally set it up as RAID 0 since I was so frustrated). Data loss is terrible, and I hope this never happens to me again. I still have a lot to catch up on. But the blog will go on… I promise…

Image brought you in part by MS Paint.  Special thanks to Western Digital for losing my copy PhotoShop CS2.

Oh, and a word of advice. Western Digital’s slogan is “PUT YOUR LIFE ON IT”. Please, don’t put your life on it. Aside from the terrible one-year warranty that came with my last drive, apparently the quality is CRAP. Never have I ever had a hard drive just die like that. Things just don’t go wrong with hard drives unless they’re built crappily in a third-world country like Malaysia. I’m definitely not putting my life on any hard drives anytime soon.