Bradley J. Shively

Data Loss

// February 8th, 2009 // personal

My 1TB Seagate hard drive has been acting up lately, and I assumed it was on its last legs. Coincidentally, I had just begun burning most of the data on the drive to DVD and erasing it to make room for other content.

It started with my torrent application, µTorrent, giving me periodic “The device is not connected.” errors.  The only way I was able to resolve these was by rebooting my system.  I also noticed that the drive would make an audible pinging sound when these errors started cropping up.

I largely disregarded these warning signs, and continued with my copying processes.  I also continued to watch video I had stored on the drive.  To be quite honest, I didn’t much care if I lost some of the data on the drive as nearly all of it could be easily replaced.

This morning, the drive took its last breath.  Rebooting the machine took an extremely long time, as the drive struggled to initialize.  It then showed up only as “Local Disc” in My Computer, with size and free space readings both of 0 bytes.  I migrated the drive to an eSata enclosure, but had similar results.

When I attempted to run chkdsk on the drive, that seemed to deal the final blow.  Multiple data recovery programs were unable to even detect, let alone scan, the drive.  Lastly, two linux live CDs failed to boot with the drive connected.

Fortunately for me, the drive still has a large balance of warranty remaining on it.  I have opted for Seagates advanced exchange program, which for $19.99 gets me a replacement drive up front via 2-day shipping as well as covers my return shipping.  Since I figured I would spend close to $10 just to ship the drive one way, and I have had RMA procedures take upwards of 3 weeks in the past, this was the best option.

I should note, I really like Seagates products.  They have excellent warranties (5 years on some drives) and I have rarely had problems with them.  I have had many more drive crashes from Western Digital, Hitachi, and others.  Also, the drive died after only about a year of use, but since it served as my primary bittorrent hub, I was literally reading from and writing to the drive almost 24 hours a day.

All told, I probably lost about 600GB of data of various types.  Most of it can be easily replaced, albeit it is a bit of a hassle.  I’m very fortunate that of all my drives, this is the one that crashed.  The others could have cost me a great deal more both in terms of time and pain associated with data loss.  Once my replacement drive arrives, I will most likely reevaulate my backup strategy (as well as the frequency at which I archive data and remove it from my active storage).