Catastrophic Hard Drive Failure

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If the headline above made you cringe, you know how I felt earlier this evening. When I got home from a baseball tournament I participated in all day, I was entreated to the news that my 120gb External Hard Drive (Fantom Drive if you must know) had fallen off my desk while a member of my family was “rearranging” things on my computer table. Unfortunately, gravity-and a concrete floor-kicked in at the same time as it was reading data off the disk, which resulted in a “catastrophic hard drive failure” or what I have affectionately started referring to as a CHDF. CHDFs are not fun, especially when it suddenly results in the loss of mounds of data (over 70gb in my case). Luckily, it wasn’t my primary drive and was exclusively a media drive, however, it’s still quite painful…

In a stunning set of irony, my external hard drive was being used to backup my primary drive music and pictures. What happens when you lose the backup before the main one? Anyways.

Unaware of the impending loss of disk space, I’ve been recently looking at data storage, both internal and external. My search has been quickened by the sudden demise of my 120gb Ext. Drive, because if my main drive fails (it’s showing signs of age and breakdown) I will be short two hard drives and around 90% of my data, along with about 99.6% of my critical data (things like Firefox, Email, Operating System, word and picture and video processing software, utilities, etc). I’m sure you can see my plight.

However, thankfully hard drives have been getting bigger and better. Terabyte drives are now affordable, and over at Dealhack.com I recently saw a 1TB drive for only $290!!! These developments will drive down the price of smaller and older hard drives to astoundingly low levels. Two years ago, I bought an 80GB internal hard drive for about $65, which wasn’t bad at the time. Two months ago, I bought a 120GB external USB 2.0 hard drive for $80 dollars. Right now, in comparison, I’m looking at a 500GB 16MB 7200RPM USB2.0 external hard drive for $140, and a 120GB 7200RPM internal hard drive for $55. Wow.

It astounds me to see how cheap disk drives are getting, and it’s the same thing with flash media! Driving by MicroCenter, I saw an advert for a 2GB USB keydrive for around $10! Despite all of the crap I’ve had to go through in the last couple of hours, I’ve realized it’s not so bad: I get to check out some new hardware, probably purchase some of it, and educate you of PaulTech readership of the plummetting prices of disk media. Hey, there’s even a chance Fantom will be able to repair my drives and salvage the data.

Hopefully…. I don’t want to reinstall Steam, CnC3 and NFS Most Wanted.

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