| Paul Rubin 2004-12-16, 6:26 pm |
| About 4 years ago I bought a Maxtor Diamondmax 60GB ATA drive at
CrapUSA. I didn't really need it, but was just astounded at the
concept of being able to buy such a high capacity drive for a mere
$300 (of course that amount will get you a much bigger drive now). My
system at the time was using a mid-90's 4 GB Seagate SCSI drive that
I'd paid around $1000 for, and which still worked fine last time I
tried it.
I ended up not installing the drive for quite a long time, mostly
because I'd gotten a good laptop and didn't use my desktop system any
more. About 2 years ago I finally put the drive in the desktop
system, installed an OS on it, and used it a little before going back
to the laptop. That worked fine.
Last month I decided to install the 60 GB Maxtor drive in a USB 2.0
external enclosure and use it to back up a newer laptop I'd just
bought. Once powered up, the drive made weird clanking noises, like
the heads were slamming into the stops, similar to the way I had a
Travelstar laptop drive fail a couple years ago. The computer never
recognized the drive and the noise didn't stop til I powered the drive
down.
We're talking about a basically brand new drive that had at most a few
dozen power-on hours (I might have left it spinning overnight once--I
don't remember) and two or three active operating hours, but which is
4 years old and had been sitting in a drawer for about 2 years.
I've heard at various times that hard drives are no good for long term
data archiving, because their internal lubricants dry out, nonvolatile
memory in the drive electronics starts dropping bits, etc. I'm
wondering if I experienced something like that here.
I'll post separately about some crappy experiences I'm having with a
DVD recorder. For now I'll say backing up on hard drives appears to
be a poor strategy. Backing up on DVD isn't working too well either.
I still have a DDS-2 DAT drive in storage so maybe I can find it and
start using it again, though its capacity is pretty limited by today's
standards. If I want to get serious about backing up my home system,
I may have to buy an LTO drive, which I'd have thought was outlandish
for non-enterprise users. I may make yet another post about that too.
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