Well, it finally happened to me. I lost a hard drive – or I would have, if I hadn’t swapped it out.
It’s really quite amazing, I think, that I’ve been using computers heavily since I was 9 years old (I’ll be 23 on the 11th of August, for reference), and yet just recently, one of my hard drives started to go bad. It seems that everyone I know who’s used computers for any amount of time has suffered a hard drive crash; while I certainly didn’t want to join the club, I did feel a bit left out. “Me? Nope, never had a hard drive crash.” Oh well. I’m in the club now, whether I wanted membership or not.
The clicking – that dreadful scraping, clicking sound – started about two weeks ago. At first I paid little attention to it. I’d heard other bits of hardware make strange sounds in the past, and nothing ever came of it. Unfortunately, as the days ticked by, the clicking became worse. It reached a point where the clicking was constant; if the computer was up and running, that not-very-healthy-sounding clicking was present.
I thought the clicking was coming from the oldest hard drive I have in my computer, a tiny 20gb drive which I’ve had for 6 or 7 years. It’s the drive I use for my mp3s, and considering its age, I really did expect it to be the one kicking the bucket. I was wrong. When I finally accepted fate – that one of my hard drives was dying, and I should damn well do something about it – I discovered that instead of my ancient hard drive being on its death bed, it was my newest hard drive. It was my 80gb SATA drive, which I bought from newegg.com in April of 2004. Pathetic! I know hardware goes bad, but isn’t 3 years a bit short for a hard drive? Perhaps I’m wrong; like I said, up until now, I’d had no experience with the phenomena. At any rate, whether it’s normal or not, it was, for sure, my 80gb drive, with Windows XP and the vast majority of my programs installed on it. Sigh.
Being broke (a seemingly chronic problem for many university students), I ripped the 40gb drive out of my inactive Tivo box, and swapped things out. To get everything up and running again without being forced by the Windows XP installer to erase lots of data on my other 2 drives, I had to swap around some of the IDE cables. In fact, I had to swap around all of the IDE ribbon cables. That’s something I hadn’t done in quite a while, and I must say: who in the hell invented those things? Really, now! Of all the types of cables, why would you decide that the standard cable to use inside of a small, cramped area would be gigantically wide ribbon cables, which don’t like to be twisted much at all? Ugh.
Anyway – all is well now. My PC is relatively quiet again, and no data was lost. Now all I have to do is muster up the courage to shove all of the power and IDE cables back into the tower, and slap the side of the case back on. As it is now, I have big, black ribbon cables and bright green power cables hanging out of the side of my computer. All tinted in a lovely blue glow from my power supply, no less.
Comments 4
Hard drive quality’s been going down over the past few years. While it used to be standard that HD’s came with a 3-year warranty, they now come with only 1 year standard. Meaning? Hard drives from before were built to be better than hard drives of today.
Isn’t progress great? What do you do with one of those things anyway? Can you recycle it?
Posted 31 Jul 2007 at 12:18 pm ¶I didn’t know about the warranty shortening; that’s pretty lame.
I’m not sure what you do with them. I’ve not thrown mine away yet. I was actually told by a techie friend that he’s heard that you can sometimes delay the death by – get this – throwing it on the floor. It supposedly knocks stuff back into alignment. It sounds crazy, but if the thing’s already dying, what’s it going to hurt, right?
Having said that, though, I’m still hesitant to go throwing an 80gb drive to the floor. Something deep in my geek circuitry says that doing such a thing is a technological heresy.
Posted 31 Jul 2007 at 10:13 pm ¶I’m dreading it happening to me. Of course, I have no backup whatsoever and nothing in the bank for emergencies like that. Oh well, who said we shouldn’t hold on to earthly possessions again?
Posted 01 Aug 2007 at 4:54 pm ¶My “dying” hard drive has been dying for at least three years now.
When I first had troubles with it, I wiped it and then ran a diagnostic on it which somehow blocked the “bad” parts and reduced my 40 gig drive to 31.3 gig.
When I moved two years ago, it started to get picky during startup. I would make a really neat noise, and then no operating system would be detected. I would keep turning it off and on until it worked.
Right now it is a slave in my new computer. There is still some files I would like to take off it. Perhaps when I’m done that I’ll drop it and see if it feels any better or worse after that.
Interesting note (to me anyway): since making it a slave, I’ve had no troubles with it not being detected at startup or making that lovely clunk/grind noise….
Posted 01 Aug 2007 at 9:31 pm ¶Post a Comment