How do you handle your HDD loss?

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BigDan

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 22, 2003
Messages
324
Well last night my 120 gig WD Harddrive started making the tell tale clicking noises signaling its demise. Not wanting to even mess with it I just shut down the computer for the night. This morning I woke up and sure enough, the drive is dead. ( RIP you POS drive, why you randomly died after a year or so of (light) service is beyond my reasoning. )

Anyhow, this is the first drive I have purchased that has died on me. Granted I've only bought 2 harddrives in my day... both Western Digital... but anyways... do you guys just chalk it up as a loss or attempt to return the drive to the manufacturer or what?

I see a 160 gig seagate drive on sale for $60 after rebates at Circuit City but I'm not sure if I am ready to bite the bullet... again.
 
I always try to RMA my hard drives if they fail. Either with who I bought them with or with the manf. I have returned a HD to WD and they have always been fast about getting it back to me.

To deal with a hard drive failure I have my computer setup this way. Here is my setup which is only one of many ideas you may find.....

basically I have two hard drives. Both the exact same and bought them both of newegg. On one I put everything games, programs, OS. The other I have as file backup. I put copies of documents, saved game files and all my music. When one starts to click or die, I quickly find out which one it is and move data or back up accordingly.

The other setup I use is the following: 1 hard drive for boot. Usually either like a raptor or just a another hard drive. That will have my OS on it. Then I have two other hard drives. One for files, programs and games, the second to mirror the other hard drive. If one starts to crash I move as many files over as possible.
 
First off I try to keep a system drive (small & fast) and a data drive (large and slower) I also keep lots of spare space about, and also I try to keep one HDD of the largest size I have free. This way I can more-or-less dump a drive image onto a free disk if one dies. For large mass storage I have a 'cold' file-server that has a 1.6TB RAID5 array on it, it only gets booted to put data onto or take data off it. This system seems to work quite well.

When a drive fails, and it is when, try to RMA it, usually you do get a replacement while it is in warranty.
 
Oddly, I've never had a hard drive die on me... well... Not exactly true. I've had them die but putting them in the fridge cured all of them. Guess I've been lucky. :p
 
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