New Hard Drive
Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t had a chance to post new articles lately. Well, I’ve been having a problem as my computer has been adamantly warning me that my hard drive will be failing soon.
So for the past few weeks, I have been sorting and backing up all the articles of Anything Under the Sun and its sister websites. And since our articles and pictures are several gigabytes in size, backing them up to a USB 2.0 external drive has been painfully slow.
Table of Contents
Old Hard Drive Set Up
One of the things I enjoy doing in my spare time is to play around with the latest technology. So when I had a little extra cash years ago, I decided to set up a RAID, or redundant array of independent disks, system on my home computer using two 1.5 terabyte Seagate hard drives.
Using the BIOS, I set up 500 gigabytes to run my Operating System, applications, and games on two striped partitions. This made the performance of noticeably faster as the computer spread the information between two areas.
[It’s kind of like having two cashiers take care of your purchases.]
That left me with 1 gigabyte for each drive, which I ended up mirroring. This meant that every bit of data I had was written into two separate hard drives. So if one would fail, I will be able to recover the data from the other hard drive. This was used in conjunction with an older 500 GB hard drive, which I used as a stand-alone drive.
Unfortunately, those 1.5 Terabyte old models didn’t last very long. After a little over a year, my computer was telling me that one hard drive would fail soon. And just as it predicted, one crashed and went to hard drive heaven.
Fortunately, all my important data was mirrored so all I did was to reinstall my Operating System on the surviving hard drive and got my data back.
Less than five years after purchasing it, the second one followed its brother to hard drive heaven. And since it was just a single hard drive, I could have lost everything because there was no mirror or back up.
Fortunately, I had activated the SMART, also known as the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, option on my motherboard. It was this option that recently kept bugging me to back up my hard drive because it expected it to fail soon. And sure enough, it did.
Interestingly, it was my old 500 GB hard drive that outlasted these two newer 1.5 Terabyte hard drives. When my old drive finally died, it had provided me with about 8 years of continuous service.
[Not bad for an old drive.]
New Hard Drive Set Up
With my budget being a little tighter this time around, I ended up getting a new 1 terabyte hard drive. But instead of sticking with the previous brand, I decided to buy something from Western Digital.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there aren’t any 1.5 Terabyte hard drives out there anymore. Capacities are now whole numbers, hence there are only 1, 2, and 4 Terabyte sizes available.
Being on a budget, I decided to just get a 1 Terabyte Blue Series drive which cost PhP 2,650 at one of the computer shops in Gilmore. The 2 Terabyte drive wasn’t that much more expensive at PhP 3,250, but I prefer to see how this one lasts before deciding to buy more.
[I might end up going back to my old brand if this one doesn’t survive very long.]
For all I know, I just might have been unfortunate enough to have gotten a bad batch with the 1.5 Terabyte ones because the 500 GB drive lasted quite long. My concern is that I am worried that history may repeat itself with this new brand, so I’ll wait a while before deciding on an additional purchase.
Final Thoughts
The prices of hard drives have dropped tremendously. A 1 Terabyte can be purchased for just PhP 2,650 today. This is a welcome change because my old 1.5 Terabyte drives cost me something like PhP 4,600 each a few years ago.
The only caveat I noticed was that warranties are now down to just one year. This is a big drop from the three to five-year warranties I enjoyed years ago. And this is actually the main reason why I didn’t buy a pair of 4 Terabyte hard drives; I am worried they might fail a few months after their warranties expire.
Well, time for me to put this hard drive through its paces by running a few tests. And while I don’t expect it to fail within a year, I do hope it lasts for at least five years.