It was a good drive, and I liked it

It's always hard to say goodbye, but the life of one particular good friend is at an end, my trusty 500gb external drive in its vaguely book shaped enclosure spat its last byte out of its little USB port earlier tonight. It was only just over 4 years old, I know you're all wondering, what, have you lost all those models and stuff you've been thinking of once again giving away for free?

Well, no, luckily I had backed up everything related to work and models and everything else just a few weeks ago.  What I did lose was a whole ton of media files, games and a couple of unfinished concept pics that were only saved in there by accident, nothing particularly vital.   All the same I will miss the reassuring blue glow, flickering from somewhere behind my monitors and surely think many times about watching something and then feel the sadness of its loss. Or even worse, have to try and remember my login at Eagle Dynamics and probably have to beg the overlords there so I can download Black Shark again.

You know that smell, that burned diode smell? Well this smelt nothing like that, nothing like that at all.

(And before you ask, yes I have tried the drive (a Western Digital Caviar Green Power) removed from its enclosure and placed in my least dusty PC but its so bad it even stops the PC from booting to windows!  The power supply and its related enclosure board work perfectly, even when completely removed from the casing.)

As life likes to throw up odd synchronicities this happened just a day after making a big fuss in the previous blog posting and on SFM about backing up and maintaining old files - a huge task for someone who's used a PC heavily for more than a decade - and how I'd resurrected old files from some disks that were in poor condition.

So put that backup off no longer, set-up that RAID, buy a new HDD and a pack of blank DVD's, upload all your sh*t to the internet or stream it onto VHS like its 1992.  And most importantly, don't trust your old backup CD's, they go rusty, or something, whatever they do, its doing it, slowly dissolving in your neglected backup cases, right now - entropy encroaches on your data, don't lose it. Don't trust anyone over 30 or a HDD over 3 years old... No, wait, don't trust anyone, ever, and don't ever trust a hard drive, no matter how youthful.  

Hmm, or is it?  I bet I can convert that old enclosure into a wicked ghetto drive caddy, perfect for accessing my old SATA drives.  Just a little dremelling is all, what could go wrong...?