Hard Disk Drive woes

About three years ago Mike bought me an iPod, and I started copying all of our CDs onto my PC hard drive so I could listen to them on the iPod. It quickly became apparent that we had way more CDs than would fit on my PC, so we bought an external USB hard drive (160 GB) and loaded all the CDs into iTunes.

Over the past few months, that drive turned flaky, and would disconnect and reconnect the USB link randomly. I tried different USB ports and different USB cables; we tried laying the drive on it's side; even tried keeping it cool with an ice pack to see if it the problem was temperature related, but no luck. It was time for a replacement, before the old one died completely. So last week was spent copying all of the photos and music from the old drive to a new one (500 GB!), a painful task since I couldn't just do a bulk copy and let it go, due to the continuous dropped connections. Windows isn't smart enough to pick up where it left off when the device appears to go away. I finally finished the copying last weekend, and I'm happy to say that the new drive has behaved flawlessly, and is even faster.

Being former hard drive development engineers, we're still tempted to take the old one apart and see if we can diagnose it. We couldn't find any paperwork that would say if the thing is still under warranty (probably not), so we don't have anything to lose, but we also don't have access to any of the nifty tools that would make the problem easy to diagnose.

So, it still sits there on the desk, looking archaic next to the new sleek, quiet drive. I feel better having everything backed up again locally. The next step will be to set up an off-site automatic back-up, something we've talked about, and even investigated, but have not actually acted upon.