Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Next... after the machine came up it was still acting weird. No F:, G: or H: drive....well that's my second SATA drive...250GB, divided into 3 equal size partitions. F: and H: are the important ones....lots of important data files on F: and H: is my itunes/MP3 drive.

Guess that's what I get by giving Western Digital another chance. The problem is all the companies that are left in business are the ones that I at one time or another swore I would never buy a drive from them again due to excessive failures in my (now) distant past.

Back when drives were MB instead of GB....I lost quite a few Maxtors in the 99-331MB range...a couple were 213MB drives. Yet, now I have lots of Maxtors in service here. I might get a Maxtor to replace the WD.

This is actually my first WD at home, in several previous jobs I've experienced high failure rate with WD drives....so I had figured that I would probably avoid them for home use.

Of course, the same can be said for Seagates and IBM drives, all the drives that by those failed at work...so far none of the ones I own have failed. Well, I don't own any IBM drives....but the Seagates are still working.

Well, after a couple hard reboots, the drive seems to be back....I guess I should plan on making a special backup of the drive...the 250GB PATA Maxtor drive from RMA that I mentioned in a different post might be helpful. It is on a different machine in my network, so I guess I'll be clogging up my network on the weekend. Along with hunting down tapes to do special tape backups.

I think I'm going to run out and order another SATA drive...rather than see how WDC's RMA process works for a drive that passed their diagnostic, but disappears randomly (this has happened a few times in the past couple of weeks, but this is the first time a soft reboot didn't make it come back).