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deadbook

#

After a year of working fine, my external hard drive click-click-died within the space of three days.

Now, I am a fan of Western Digital, for their drives have served me well, especially after I was struck by (then) IBM's DeskDeathStar (I had to keep it in the fridge for an hour, twice, just to get /some of/ my data back). But this time I am annoyed.

See, external hard drives like the MyBook never experience the same load internal ones do. There's no OS to scratch the heads back and forth, no apps to load zillions of files, no logs being written all the time, no virtual memory swapped in and out, nothing really. All of a sudden, power and commands to the drive's motors, won't get through.

I realise in this day and age it's an economical affair - build more but less solid drives, and teach people to backup. But, but, we might as well just go RAID on everything then, no?? I mean, since when does a drive go faulty by just sitting on a desk and serving iTunes music?

Anyway, I got a new WD drive (only three times bigger and half as power-hungry, yay for Green Edition devices), voided my warranty, opened the unit, replaced the drive. All is well. But still, I could do without losing one day just for this random reason..

Curiously, the old drive could not be rescued. It would have gone to Heckler, who helped install the 750gig one in that same box. Anyway, point is - WD could have learned a thing or two from, say, Quantum??

/rant

no joke
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