It is unfortunate but I will soon be availing myself of Seagate’s wonderful 5 year warranty on one of my 500gb media hard drives. It has not failed completely yet, but it is having read/write errors when I put it under the stress of doing video compression. This is, as we say in the OMG my data is not backed up business, a bad thing. Luckily, these errors are being recorded into the drives error monitoring hardware, so it should be easy to prove the drive is malfunctioning and get an in warranty replacement.
Of course first I need to back up the data on the drive. The drive is 1/2 of my 1Tb media partition which has ~750Gb used on it. Because of the way its setup i have to back up all of the partition without using the other 500gb drive, a tall order that my ancillary drives simply cant handle. They total only 493Gb. So I need to buy new drives, thats ok, 750Gb’s just dropped to $200 and 500gb’s dropped to $100. So I’ll just get some more $500’s as thats a $0.066 price per GB difference (which adds up). Problem is that I haven’t gotten a new computer since the Athlon XP went out of style. That was before the rise of SATA over PATA. Now I could buy 2 500gb PATA drives and use them in my current system, but that path prevents me from future upgrades and locks me into the old stuff. As it turns out older stuff gets more expensive, so thats a bad thing. So that means that now is the time to upgrade and start buying SATA drives. So I’m building a new system, dual core, and all. The components:
Update: @ 10:30am 6.25.2007 Aww, still in Philadelphia.