Monday, 20 February 2012

The Death of D5

Losing a hard drive is never a pretty business.

This is my third drive failure. The first I was too young to remember fully. My only recollection was that it was a Seagate. The second was a lively 500GB Maxtor drive around 3-4 years ago; a time when I had yet to seriously invest in backup drives. I lost a great deal of data in that episode: a tragedy of gargantuan proportions.

These days, I'm in a much better state. All my data is backed up with at least one offline copy, and my main file server sports RAIDZ redundancy, courtesy of the incomparable Zettabyte File System. So today's hard drive failure isn't going to compare with my 500GB drive failure some years back, as I have an abundance of backups. 

It does, however, strike a particularly poignant note, since the loss is that of the drive which has hosted my primary OS for over six years. Whilst it was most recently the workhorse drive of Ace3, my least powerful 24x7 system, it wasn't long ago that Ace3 was called Ace1; my primary beast.

Seventy-two months of round-the-clock operation, always in constant spin mode. Approaching 200 million seconds of uptime. Assuming the 7200rpm speed was always maintained, that comes out to over 22 billion revolutions. 

A sad day indeed.



Oh; and yes, you did guess correctly. It was a Seagate.

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