Sunday, February 19, 2012

I'm back

10:57 AM / Technology / Comments1 Comment

Technology

Sorry for my recent disappearance - computer woes. I'd practically just installed my new video card when one of my hard disks started to fail.

I have four drives in my system:

  1. an 80 GB SSD which I use as a boot device;
  2. another 80 GB SSD which I use as an install drive for games and the contents of my "My Documents" folder;
  3. a 1 TB hard drive (a Hitachi DeskStar) which I use for storing pictures, music, a few miscellaneous applications, copies of this web site going back to August 2001, and a stack of movie files (mainly trailers and stuff downloaded from YouTube); and
  4. a 2 TB hard drive (Western Digital Caviar Black) containing my documents, drivers, installers and about 600 GB of recorded TV shows and movies.

Guess which one decided to fail?

It would have to be the largest one, wouldn't it? I first became aware of the problem when I came back to find that the entire system had locked up while attempting to unpack the installation files for THE WITCHER 2 (which I'd just finished redownloading from Good Old Games). Initially I was ready to blame the new video card (any new technology will tend to have teething problems and, with AMD yet to release WHQL certified drivers for the card, I'm currently using beta drivers), but when the same thing happened again while attempting to write to the hard drive, the culprit was obvious. After a reboot, a short DST in SeaTools failed, and I got that sinking feeling I always get when I realise a hard drive is on the way out.

It could have been worse. I did lose some data, but it was only the document I was writing to the drive at that given time. (Unfortunately it was the latest redrafting of the PhD chapter I'm currently working on, and my last backup was nearly a week old.) The rest I was able to siphon off on to various hard drives, including my laptop. (Copying 350 GB of data over 100 Mbit Ethernet is not fun.) The hard drive, which was only two years old, has been sent back to Western Digital to be RMA'd (thank fuck for five-year warranties). However, unwilling to sit around twiddling my thumbs for up to 28 days before seeing a replacement, I decided to burn a hole in my wallet and pick up a new drive (I'll either sell the replacement WD send me or keep it around for occasions such as this). Unfortunately, hard disk prices are still through the roof due to shortages brought about by the flooding in Thailand last year, so I wasn't exactly spoiled for choice, and the few drives that WERE available were pretty expensive. Still, I eventually managed to get an OEM Hitachi DeskStar 7K3000 for just over £150 including delivery. So yeah, not exactly overjoyed to be forking out yet MORE money I can't really afford on computer parts, but at least I'm up and running again. Hopefully this one'll last a bit longer than two years.

 
1 Comment

1. Ravenus said:

Good luck. From what I hear a lot of the HDD manufacturers are cutting warranties on new units to 1-2 years.
Oh btw, DVDBeaver has a review for Arrow's Conformist blu-ray. Now I love this film and the review is largely positive about the video quality but I don't know, the brightness levels in the screenshots seem less natural than the Paramount DVD version and some shots seem to have an ugly level of noise (or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about).
It'd be nice if you could say something about this.

(Posted on Monday, February 20, 2012 at 3:55 PM)

 
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