So . . . I finally get the desktop back from the shop. Another dead hard drive. Oddly enough, another Seagate. You’d think by dead drive #4, I’d start to notice a pattern, wouldn’t you?
Yep. After the old Seagate 120Gb drive died, which was neither unexpected nor particularly traumatic — because I had backups that worked — I just disconnected it and carried on . . . no point in powering a dead drive. It had had a long and useful life as the primary drive in my previous desktop, so it had paid its dues.
The two 320Gb Seagate Free Agent drives having MTBF measured in tens of hours was depressing, but oh well. It’s not like either one of them lasted long enough to actually be, you know, useful or anything.
The fricking Seagate 500Gb primary backup drive crapping out after just over a year was more than a bit disappointing. It was the drive I’d been using for backups and for local storage of infrequently needed things (photos, old documents, scans, etc.). Not everything on the drive had made its way to other media, of course. Some documents lost, some scans I’ll have to re-do, and so on.
So, today’s to-do list includes picking up a 2-bay drive enclosure with an Ethernet port, and a matching pair of big hard drives to put in it. RAID-1, here I come.
Update: I’m now waiting for the pair of 1Tb hard drives to be formatted for RAID-1. Advice from Chris Taylor, Andre B., and Dark Water Muse was much appreciated, thanks guys. I ended up buying a D-Link DNS-323 for the enclosure, and a pair of Hitachi SATA drives. I’d have preferred the Western Digital Green equivalents, but they were out of stock, and I wanted to get this up and running today.
