I was not online yesterday, other than via my PDA, as the main hard drive, with Windows and programs stored on it, decided to die. This is the second 300Gb Seagate hard drive in less than a year to have passed on to silicon heaven. However the first one was due to me inadvertently reversing the polarity on some case lighting, and this time was due to a faulty UPS (uninterruptable power supply). After 1 month of the warranty running out, our UPS no longer holds it’s charge at all, so when the sadly no infrequent power cuts kick in, you sometimes have no warning at all before the PC just turns off. This appears to have caused some sort of physical damage to the hard drive concerned (rather than a ‘simple’ logical fault with 0 and 1 being in the wrong place). Anyway, I eventually managed to nurse the drive back to enough response to extract the few documents stored on this drive, and then struggled to install Windows on a new hard drive. Even though there are 5 other drives to choose from, for a while none of them wanted to play ball.
Anyway, enough of the moaning, I haven’t lost much, other than time and sleep, and all my research for Amsterdam was eventually recovered, so back to normal activity from now on 🙂
Aug 10 2007
August 10th, 2007 12:17 pm
A friend of mine has recently told me that Seagate drives are not worth buying any more. Two years ago I had issues with my Barracuda 160 Gb, and even though it was a sort of incompatibility problem, I don’t have much faith in Seagate now.
August 10th, 2007 5:12 pm
To be fair, the drives both died in exceptional circumstances. The only drives I’ve had corrupt on me in normal use have not been Seagates.
That said, I’ve not actually paid for any drive other than a Seagate in 8 years, so perhaps the competition have improved…
August 10th, 2007 6:24 pm
By a strange coincidence, the last drive I bought is a Seagate as well (500 Gb ext.)
I think I should give, say, WD a try.