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I heard a disturbing sound in the computer room when I wandered in there with my first cup of coffee this morning. It was something between an angry buzz and a hum, almost like a transformer that is getting ready to explode. The sound had one of those all-pervasive qualities that you get in a room full of various whirs and drones and sound-reflecting surfaces. I couldn't readily isolate it, but I had narrowed it down to one of four things:
Since my computer seemed to be working (for a change), I deduced that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
atara's new computer must be in distress. Still operating under the hope that it was either the power supply, or a cord caught in a fan, I tried to shut down windows, and everything froze up. At that point I knew that I was dealing with a hard drive. The buzz I was hearing was probably the sound of a drive head bouncing merrily along on a platter. That was pretty much confirmed for me when I manually powered off the machine and heard the buzz of the hard drive spinning down.
The only silver lining out of this is that it is the new hard drive that died. Almost all of her important, irreplaceable files are still on the old drive. That's not to say that she didn't lose anything, and she is also faced with a whole new install/reconfigure cycle once we get the replacement drive. She had finally got everything set up the way she liked it on the new machine when it all went to hell.
This is three hard drives we have lost in the last three of years that all died within their warranty period. The first two were IBM/Hitachi, and the most recent was a Seagate. As much as I like to save money on components, I would also like to get components that are not worthless shit that breaks inside of the first couple of months. Heck, I'd even be willing to pay a little more for my computer parts to get that.
In the mean time we'll do a repair install on her old XP hard drive so that we can get it working on her new hardware. That will keep her going until the replacement drive arrives. The price of hard drives is very low right now (for good reason, apparently) and I am seriously thinking about getting a second one and setting up a RAID 1 on her machine to help avoid this in future. What are the odds of two drives blowing up at the same time?
- A UPS getting ready to explode
- A power supply getting ready to explode
- A cooling fan with a cord rubbing up against it
- Something I didn't want to contemplate
Since my computer seemed to be working (for a change), I deduced that
atara's new computer must be in distress. Still operating under the hope that it was either the power supply, or a cord caught in a fan, I tried to shut down windows, and everything froze up. At that point I knew that I was dealing with a hard drive. The buzz I was hearing was probably the sound of a drive head bouncing merrily along on a platter. That was pretty much confirmed for me when I manually powered off the machine and heard the buzz of the hard drive spinning down.The only silver lining out of this is that it is the new hard drive that died. Almost all of her important, irreplaceable files are still on the old drive. That's not to say that she didn't lose anything, and she is also faced with a whole new install/reconfigure cycle once we get the replacement drive. She had finally got everything set up the way she liked it on the new machine when it all went to hell.
This is three hard drives we have lost in the last three of years that all died within their warranty period. The first two were IBM/Hitachi, and the most recent was a Seagate. As much as I like to save money on components, I would also like to get components that are not worthless shit that breaks inside of the first couple of months. Heck, I'd even be willing to pay a little more for my computer parts to get that.
In the mean time we'll do a repair install on her old XP hard drive so that we can get it working on her new hardware. That will keep her going until the replacement drive arrives. The price of hard drives is very low right now (for good reason, apparently) and I am seriously thinking about getting a second one and setting up a RAID 1 on her machine to help avoid this in future. What are the odds of two drives blowing up at the same time?
