Another Story

One of the drives in Nagi (my Windows box) is on the way out, as evidenced by system free




zes that leave the drive light solidly on but no




thing happening.  If I don't mess around too much I can still move my mouse and maybe switch to an app




lication that doesn't want to access the disk right now.

This is not a good thing. 


Not good.
So I went out to get some external drives to back everything up.  My friendly local electronics and computer stuff store offered several options: A 1TB Western Digital MyBook Essential drive for $129.99, a 2TB Western Digital MyBook Essential drive for $129, and a 3TB Western Digital MyBook Essential drive for $269.

I love that kind of pricing; it makes decisions so easy.

Anyway, I bought four of them.

I actually have more than 8TB of internal disk across all my computers, quite a bit more, but a fair chunk of that is backups, and backups of backups, and really bad anime that I'll never ever watch, and about a terabyte of Steam content which I can download again with one click (and two weeks of waiting).

So I'm running backups.


Running backups.
I have enough spare disks sitting around to replace all the drives in Nagi, mainly because I bought them with the intention of replacing all the drives in Nagi.*  So once the backups are done that's probably what I'll do. 

But first I'm going to get me a USB 3 card, because as things are, just restoring my C drive would take me more than 24 hours.

The drives themselves are quite small and neat, certainly smaller and neater and much less flaky than my previous Western Digital MyBook experience.  That was a 500GB drive that I bought for $250 not all that long ago.**  It worked, for a while, but then it would go into death sleep (rather like a ferret) from which the only way it could be awoken was to unplug and replug the power cord (rather like a ferret). 


Western Digital MyBook Essential (left), ferret (right).
Not terribly convenient.  It never actually lost any data or failed while it was actively in use, but it was annoying enough that I ended up just filing it away in a drawer.

So far my new MyBooks are working flawlessly.  Which is good, because there's fundamentally only two ways a disk drive can work: Flawlessly and not at all.

* And that is because all the drives in Nagi are the infamous death-by-ring-buffer Seagate 7200.11.  The gist of the story is this: The drives have a ring buffer in non-volatile memory to store the last 256 SMART alerts.  But there's a bug such that if you power on while the pointer is on the last entry (255), rather than going back to zero, it increments to 256 and overwrites the drive firmware.  In other words, if you have a drive that's not quite perfect - even running a little warm - then every time you turn your computer on there's a 0.4% chance that your drive will brick itself.  As an added bonus, Seagate's first patch for the problem also bricked your drive.  So far my drives have survived unpatched and unbricked.
** But several centuries in computer years.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:02 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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