Dead Toshiba Drive

Posted Sat Jan 28, 2006 in Computing

Sitting on top of my PowerBook is a gutted LaCie external hard drive. The drive itself, a Toshiba MK8025GAS, failied catastrophically yesterday afternoon. It was a classic bearing failure of the spindle bearing. The drive suddenly (that is, without warning) began whirring loudly. I attempted a quick backup of the data on it (my backup is about a week old) and managed to snag a few of the recently changed folders for backup on another external hard drive.

During the process, the drive howled several times, jumping on the desk. I was on the phone with Wife, describing the process when the drive chose to howl, the change in rotational inertia of the platters causing the housing to physically jump about on the desktop.

“What was that,” Wife asked, “was that the drive?”

“Yep. It just jumped on the desk and scared the snot outta me!”

“Wow!”

Ultimately the bearing locked up, or at least deteriorated to the point where the small motor was no longer able to spin the platters. I brought the unit home with me, hoping to cool it and retrieve the remaining folder from the drive. No joy.

Wife and I drove over to CompUSA last night to pick up a replacement Hitachi Travelstar drive, but while they had the drive, corporate sales was closed for the evening. That’s a policy change that I was not aware of. So we went for a bite of supper and I’ll drive over to CompUSA this morning for a replacement. It won’t take but another five minutes to reassemble the unit (LaCie charges about $50 for that little plastic and metal case and the circuit board that converts the drive to FireWire).

That’s two hard drives (both Toshiba units if I recall what was inside the PowerBook correctly) that have failed over the last month. Wife says I’m just hard on my equipment. I use it up.

Humph.

1. Wife and I drove over to CompUSA this morning and picked up the replacement drive. We then tooled up to campus where I picked up the data from two graduate students’ research that was lost. We picked up a bite of lunch, then returned home. I pulled the new drive from its anti-static bag, installed it, and reassembled the housing. It took a minute or two to reformat the new drive and then a few minutes to copy the back-up from the other external hard drive to the new one.

   Everything seems to be back to normal again. However, the lesson of a regular back-up regimen is once again enforced. It’s a tough lesson and one learned the hard way (more than once I’m ashamed to say). I think I need to check into a system that will automatically back up the drives at night at 0200 in the morning or so. The process needs to be simple and that regular.

   — ruminator    28 January 2006, 15:15    #