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Bye, Bye Data. A Dead Hard Drive Story.

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Backup is not something as a home user that you think about everyday. I sure didn’t, until I had hard drive trouble. Then you start mentally listing all of the important documents and photos that you are about to lose. After I resigned to the fact that my Hard Drive was toast, I went down to Best Buy and bought another one. I got a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9. It was only $149.00 (after rebate) for 200GB. So I brought it home and removed the old dead drive and installed the new drive. It worked but there was a problem. The new drive was an ATA-133 drive and I only had a ATA-100 drive controller. Another problem is that you need a ATA-133 controller to break the 137GB barrier. So Back to Best Buy. They were sold out. I then went to CompUSA to buy the controller board. Got the new drive and the new board in and am all ready to go and the new drive stops spinning. Back to Best buy to return the drive. I now have the new new drive in but the ATA-133 is not working. Back to CompUSA to exchange the ATA-133 card. Ok so now I have the new new 200GB drive and the new new ATA-133 card. Everything works perfect I have it up and running in a few minutes.

 

So now the moral of the story is to backup your data. This is hard for users to do because they don’t know what to do or where to backup the data. One cool feature of Digital Image Pro Suite 9 is an backup utility that will remind you to backup and allow you to back up to a number of different locations and media. So now I have no excuse not to back up my stuff. Another aspect to backup is off-site storage. The scenario is that you spend time doing all of the right things and backup your important memories and documents to a CD-Rom. One night your downstairs neighbor has a fire that burns down your apartment building. All of your backups are destroyed. The solution to this is to create 2 copies of you CD’s and send one copy to a relative’s house for save keeping. This will ensure that you always have a backup. I hope that you don’t lose your data like I did before you start a good backup strategy.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 27, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 27, 2004
    Well, you get what you pay for. IDE drives are just not designed to be used the way SCSI drives are. That's why the price difference but if you buy SCSI drive you know you're buying something that is designed to run non-stop for several years. And five year warranties are pretty common on them, as oposed to year or two on IDE drives... And they're all compatible, as long as you stick to the same connector (50/68/80 PIN) you can connect anything with anything (U320 drive to a Ultra Wide controller and vice versa).

    As for backups on CDs - DVD recorders are pretty cheap these days, I don't think you would want to back up your 200Gig drive on CDs (even if it was ony half full it's still 140 CDs if you fill them up, as oposed to some 25 DVDs).

  • Anonymous
    January 27, 2004
    Actually, you don't need an ATA-133 controller to break the 137GB barrier. Seems like you have a relatively old mainboard, which could need a BIOS update. I'm running a 160gig ATA133 Maxtor and 250gig ATA133 Maxtor on my old ATA100 onboard controller, and I get past the 137gig barrier without any problems.

  • Anonymous
    January 28, 2004
    One option would be to seal your CD's before sending them to your relatives house.

    I agree that SCSI would be better but when you are on a tight budget what are you going to do. Also the computer is about 5 yeasr old and I let it run 24x7. So that would explain the Old BIOS version.

  • Anonymous
    January 28, 2004
    There are also security bags to store your CD's in See the link that I added to the story.

  • Anonymous
    January 28, 2004
    If only you'd had all your data on a server and linked to it from your client PC :-)

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2004
    Nice Story :)

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2004
    Have toasted a hard drive myself. Just looked at a site called deadharddrive.com where the owner describes how he rescued his hard drive, fried (like mine, apparently) by a short in the power supply. After getting a Torx screwdriver, he apparently bought an identical hard drive and borrowed the logic board from it. He had to go to some trouble to find one with a truly identical board, but that did apparently enable him to use it long enough to recover the data. Don't know that I'll go this route, but thought you might find it interesting.

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    June 07, 2009
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