# Lessons learned with Hard Drives



## MA-Caver (Sep 8, 2008)

Got this e-mail from my eldest brother who is a techno-geek and found out that even he isn't immune from the electronic plague. Read on. Might be helpful to some, amusing for others. 



In the past two weeks we have experienced two technology catastrophic events when it comes to computers.  The first was the sudden death of Dees laptop hard drive.  A three year old laptop with a 60 Gig drive gave up its electrons without warning except for a momentary  high shrill sound just before the screen went blank with a small flashing cursor.  Well dont worry I have a one year old 500 Gig WD network hard drive that I was patting myself on the back for being soooo wise in buying and installing.  Uh, what the ***^&#@! the hard drive is dead!

  Now here are some additional lessons I think you should consider when you are loading up your drives with kids photos, important scanned documents, e-mail, music, that kind of stuff.  These are:

  1.        1. Quote the Texas multi-millionaire Ross Perot to yourself everytime you go out and buy stuff (especially computers) and remember *things break*!
  2.       2. Even with a centralized backup system, back up the backup, stripe hard drives, and make CDs or better still data DVDs and store extra copies of your stuff everywhere.  Lucky for me, I do have several hard drives and CDs and a few DVDs full of family photos.  Except they are all here and I need to ship some out to family and friends.
  3.      3.  Very important  if you decide (like I did) to send out the dead laptop hard drive to a forensic specialist to recover e-mail, documents, and stuff, take a moment extra to physically inspect the hard drive.  You see, on Toshibas, Dells, and several other brands of laptops have A SMALL HARD DRIVE TO COMPUTER CONNECTOR YOU MIGHT OVERLOOK LIKE I DID.  Sorry. I did not mean to shout.   Without this small connector (see http://laptopupgrade.stores.yahoo.net/hpcolahadrco1.html ) any hard drive you install will not work.  The connector is so small that you could easily  think is part of the hard drive BUT ITS NOT!  And you will gleefully ship both items connected together right  off to Ohio making it impossible to install a new drive into your laptop at home.  Making the laptop an expensive paperweight.  Youll think you have gone crazy buying hard drives that wont connect and that all of the recommendations from the technical help desk folks are IDIOTS!.  
  4.      4. You should also learn that there are two possible types of laptop hard drives,  SATA and EIDE.  Also, be careful from where you buy them.   I bought a SATA drive by accident from a PX sponsored dealer on line.  I did this in a moment of weakness after spending several hours researching the problem of replacing the data and the drives.  So, I was a little tired and failed to notice the Web site disclaimers and warnings that the buyer was responsible for selecting the right drive as there were no returns unless the item was defective.  After receiving the SATA drive and failing to install it, I was able to re-read the vendor Web Pages and learn of the draconian no return policy.   Fortunately, I went to Best Buy to get the correct EIDE drive (sans the proper connector, which they do not sell) and I stumbled on a Rocketfish SATA hard drive enclosure.  So I will use the 250 Gig drive as part of my new back up system.

  I hope you enjoyed my pain.  I am now waiting on the $20 connector which is costing me an additional 11 bucks for shipping.  It should be here by the time I return from Chicago (I hope).  Remember, have a back up plan.


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## Shicomm (Sep 8, 2008)

It's amusing but scary as well.
Indeed some things just can't break down...  but even those things do...
Now being extra carefull , selecting brands of HDD that i really trust.
I've seen just too many maxtors and ibm/hitachi's ruined to buy them... WD or seagate will be fine most of the time


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## fireman00 (Sep 8, 2008)

Dual hard drives are nice - do your daily back ups to one drive, do a full backup weekly to the drive then burn a copy to DVD or CD.  You can also get an inexpensive thumb drive for under 60 bucks that you can move files from one system to another. We don't have a lot of pictures but as soon as they're loaded onto my PC I burn a copy of the pics to a CD.... from a lesson learned the hard way.


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## MA-Caver (Sep 8, 2008)

fireman00 said:


> Dual hard drives are nice - do your daily back ups to one drive, do a full backup weekly to the drive then burn a copy to DVD or CD.  You can also get an inexpensive thumb drive for under 60 bucks that you can move files from one system to another. We don't have a lot of pictures but as soon as they're loaded onto my PC I burn a copy of the pics to a CD.... from a lesson learned the hard way.


Well I'd like to do that but I've misplaced the product key to my Nero Burning Rom and can't install it without it... (sigh)


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## Mimir (Sep 8, 2008)

I would add that you should make sure your backups are doing what you expect they are as well.  I had an experience where one of the places that I did some computer work for had a hard drive crash.  When I got there with the replacement I asked them where the backup disks were (this was many many moons ago, but the lesson is still valid) The gave me the disks after saying that they had made backups every night.  The problem was that they were copying the origianl backup disks to new disks every day instead of backing up the hard drive.


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