| My Recent Tale Of Cybernetic Woe: Probably Not A Series (!), Though It Could Be... |
I'm not one given to hyperbole, but let's just say that I was ready to commit a crime against humanity yesterday!
Last night, as I was working along, one of my external drives began making a strange "chunk-chunk-chunk" noise. From past ugly experience (I've been working with outboard drives for over a decade now), I knew this was not a good thing. Fortunately, having learned the doctine of backing up proactively, I wasn't too worried. Everything of merit on the drive was archived, conveniently enough, on my backup drive. Of course, now I'm going to have to get another one of those... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'm also not one to necessarily jump all over a particular company just because one of their products fails. We all know (or should know, anyway) that electronics have a pretty standard 5-10% chance of failure per year. But let's just say this is not the first Western Digital drive that has died, died badly, and died too soon!
To be specific, in the last few years I've owned not one, not two but three – yes, count 'em – three Western Digital drives. These are the big honkin' 150 gig or bigger bad boys. This last one died about 30 seconds after the "chunk-chunk-chunk."
Every every single one of my Western Digital drives has died within 36 months of purchase! This is not acceptable, even for constant heavy use drives, which these were not. This latest casualty actually lasted the longest (3 years), but the other two died in 12 and 18 months (approximately). I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, friends, but I think we can begin to see a trend line here. What do you think?
Each and every one of these drives has just "up and quit" one day with no warning whatsoever. No time to "ease out" of using it and getting a replacement. Just dead. Flatline. Throw it to the curb!
Which is hard to do when you've just slashed your wrists, because hard drives never fail at a good time!
I'm beginning to think it's the enclosures on these damn things. Western Digital seems to believe that jamming everything it can into a small case with no air flow is a great idea. In my opinion, these drives just generate too much internal heat and eventually go – sorry ladies – tits up!
Now, yesterday was a particularly hot day by Ventura County standards. Unlike L.A., homes up here don't have air conditioning as a rule. It's usually unnecessary. So I had windows open and a fan going. But it's interesting, none-the-less, that the drive chose yesterday to quit. Methinks it is more than a coincidence!
Anyway, I'll never buy another Western Digital drive, which is too bad because they used to make excellent products. Blame it on the heat, blame it on overseas manufacturing, blame it on fate... I don't care. I blame it on poor engineering. And as an engineer's grandson, I can only say that may be the biggest sin of the all! I'm not trusting my data to Western Digital ever again, and neither should you!
After the failure of the drive, add to it the failure of the data protection software that's supposed be smart enough to see such things coming.
FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit is supposed to warn of upcoming drive problems! I'm none-too-happy with it because it never has. Not once. Ever. Worse yet, it never seems to be able to pull any files from a dead drive even though I've always gone to the trouble of installing the components that are supposed to do that. Heck, recovering files from "bricks" is one of Hard Disk Toolkit's big selling points! Faw! Prove to me it works, guys! I haven't seen it do so once, not since the "old days" of pre OS X. Hard Disk Toolkit did work back then...
That's right. "Back in the day" of OS 7, 8 and 9, Harddisk Toolkit was da bomb. Now it is a bomb, but not in a good way!
No more upgrades for FWB. I guess I'll be switching over to ProSoft's suite of products (Data Rescue, etc.). Sigh...