One of those nights...

[BasiliskWrangler]

You know what I'm talking about- you go to use your computer (perhaps a real important computer with lots of important stuff on it) and discover that the c: drive is toast. The BIOS doesn't even acknowledge its existence, and when it's plugged in the head just makes a rhythmic tapping sound- the last bit of its rudimentary nervous system still trying to do what it has been programmed to do, without realizing the rest of its body is stone cold dead.

So yeah, instead of relaxing with the family and/or watching a movie this Saturday night, I get to rebuild my workstation (new hard drive, reinstall OS, drivers, dozens of software packages, updates, restore all lost data, etc.). 8 hours into it and I still am only 50% of the way done.

I guess I should look into Ghosting the c: drive...

[Reinhart]

O_O Good lord, I'm sorry to hear that.

I've had my fair share of computer death, first time it happened I had to learn the hard lesson of: back absolutely everything up on a second drive.

Hope the rest of the restoration work gets done speedily and you don't tear your hair out in frustration.

[CrazyBernie]

Well an image backup is fine and dandy if you never have to replace the motherboard...

My Dad asked me to re-isntall windows on his father-in-law's computer, and expected it to only take me a couple hours... two days later I was finished. How easily he forgets that the process of setting up a computer for a consumer vs. corporation is a tad different. He's too used to just blowing an image onto a new machine and being finished in under an hour. =P

[Randomizer]

I worked on a computer with a corrupted copy of the operating system installed by the vendor, so every few months the C drive would disappear and the hardware list would need to be reinstalled from a floppy diskette.

I spent 2 days reinstalling my operating system because the CD-ROM had a corrupt version of the web browser. After I figure that out I had to find a clean version to replace it just to get everything working. I still don't know what wrecked the operating system so it could barely boot up.

[CrazyBernie]

Unfortunately that is the nature of the beast that is a computer... there's so many factors involved that occasionally problems will occur that are unexplainable. One of the most basic things that people fail to troubleshoot is the electrical portion... the uneven flow of power coming through the outlet, the surge protector that might no longer be working, the power supply that may be failing, a blown capacitor, etc. Computers like a steady stream of electricity, and the power that comes into your house is hardly steady.

People assume that because you plug it in, it should just work correctly. Bad people, bad!

[BasiliskWrangler]

This is the 3rd hard drive I've lost in the past 14 months (an understandable ratio when you know how may HDs I have in service here). Whatever the cause, the fact is all mechanical HDs will fail at some point.

All my hope lies in the new generation of solid state hard drives. No moving parts, low power consumption, some with MTBF of 2,000,000 hours or more. Yes, they are very pricey but dare to dream.

[CrazyBernie]

It's going to take several revisions of SSD before I trust them for any long term, frequently accessed data storage. It is basically flash memory after all... with limited cell re-writes (so make sure you don't use any defrag utilities... ). Besides, for less than the cost of a single 250GB SSD drive, you could have a RAID5 w/ 4 1TB drives and a dedicated raid controller. 3TB of storage, speed + redundancy with no downtime... then there's always RAID6 if you're really paranoid and don't mind losing another TB of space...

But, with SATA3 in the works for a 6Gbps transfer support, SSDs are definitely going to be the way to go for max performance setups. The SSD companies are claiming massive price reductions in the next year or so, but we'll have to wait and see. There's still a big variation in performance (and price) between brands as the tech develops.

Drive choices aside, nothing beats having a dedicated backup solution.