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Hard drive fun
Aug. 2nd, 2004 09:17 amThe morning after we got home from Berzerker, my computer started running extremely slowly. I quickly determined that one of the drives was getting cranky, bad sectors in the main directory area or something like it, so whenever anything tried to get a device list, it would have to wait for that to time out.
So it's off to CompUSA; they have 200GB drives for $80 after rebate. Picked up a USB 2.0 enclosure at the same time, so I can use it on the laptop if need be. So far it's working great.
The old drive is still under warranty, but Maxtor requires you to run their software on it and get an error code before they'll give an RMA. The software "fixed" the problem. This means it remapped the bad sectors to spares. This makes me nervous; those sectors didn't just go bad coincidentally, more will probably follow.
This is a 120GB drive. I think I'll put it as a 2nd in the Linux box in the basement, and let other machines back up to it. That way if it croaks, it's not a guaranteed disaster. I'll also enable SMART monitoring on it. I've been tempting fate without any really effective backup strategy for a long time. I still can't do full backups like I really want to, since I have about 700GB of drive space on the network, but a 120GB backup drive will let us save email and working dirs.
So it's off to CompUSA; they have 200GB drives for $80 after rebate. Picked up a USB 2.0 enclosure at the same time, so I can use it on the laptop if need be. So far it's working great.
The old drive is still under warranty, but Maxtor requires you to run their software on it and get an error code before they'll give an RMA. The software "fixed" the problem. This means it remapped the bad sectors to spares. This makes me nervous; those sectors didn't just go bad coincidentally, more will probably follow.
This is a 120GB drive. I think I'll put it as a 2nd in the Linux box in the basement, and let other machines back up to it. That way if it croaks, it's not a guaranteed disaster. I'll also enable SMART monitoring on it. I've been tempting fate without any really effective backup strategy for a long time. I still can't do full backups like I really want to, since I have about 700GB of drive space on the network, but a 120GB backup drive will let us save email and working dirs.
