MyBrick
Posted on | May 9, 2008 at 7:23 am | 4 Comments
Pet Peeve of the Day: One of my external hard drives died this week. It was a 250GB Western Digital MyBook (USB & Firewire). Now it’s a brick. An out-of-warranty brick. The thing has always given me trouble, so I’m not exactly sorry to see it go. It’s always run hot. It was always going to sleep and then taking a long time to wake up, which locked up the computer. It did the waking-up even when I wasn’t accessing it – just running an application would do it. Sometimes the computer would just lose the connection to it for no reason.
Luckily, the only thing I was using this drive for was backup. My backup manager ran a differential backup to it from my main drive every night and a full backup on Friday nights. Ah well, now I can buy a bigger drive and have room to backup my MP3 files as well. But I just feel gypped.
The drive died pretty quickly. One night the backup didn’t work – it kept trying to write to the drive and couldn’t. When I powered the drive off and on, it made clunking noises. I’m not enough of an engineer to take it apart and figure out if its salvageable. Plus, I was getting tired of the thing and its quirks anyway.
Strangely, my other external drive is a Western Digital as well – a 500MB “Elements” drive. Never had any problems with that one. No overheating, faster waking, fast access. That’s the one I use for my MP3s.
So long, MyBook. May you rot in MyHell!
Latre.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “fancy covers to put around key hole on car door”.
Comments
4 Responses to “MyBrick”
May 9th, 2008 @ 7:38 am
At least you’re not bored.
May 9th, 2008 @ 6:47 pm
Hey, at least it wasn’t the drive in your computer. That’d be vexing.
Before you dispose of the dead drive, think about this: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/09/columbia.data.ap/index.html
May 11th, 2008 @ 1:26 pm
I’d sure like to be able to reformat the drive before I toss it (since I bet the data’s still there), but I can’t get it to connect to the computer. Aaargh.
May 11th, 2008 @ 6:04 pm
I’d sure like to be able to reformat the drive before I toss it (since I bet the data’s still there), but I can’t get it to connect to the computer.
What power tools do you have? A drill?