#@*$$@%#!!! Stupid portable hard drive

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numaari:
I have two Seagate portable hard drives - one is 160GB, the other is 80GB.  I didn't know any better and defragmented one of them, so I expected that it's screwed up...

But the other has just puked on me.  It shows up under My Computer, I just can't access it.  Occasionally it makes a high-pitched bleep.  Last night it took an *age* to transfer files onto it, but I thought it might just be because it was getting full.

I've never been sure exactly how to treat these.  I know not to defrag them, but I assumed it's ok to do a disc cleanup on them.  What the hell did I do wrong and how can I fix it?

J. M. Pescado:
It is a splode. Hard drives these days have very limited lifespans, particularly portables that you rattle and bang about. You should probably RAID them nowadays.

numaari:
<whine>But it was less than a year old...  I feel like such an ass for buying this $120 thing that was essentially disposable.</whine>

Is there any way to make them last longer?  Should I just burn everything onto disc and access it from there?  (Can't install more memory into the 'puter because I just can't  :-\ )  I don't want to go back to wielding a huge binder of cd-roms, but I'll do what I have to.  What a colossal PITA.

Errr...  Pescado, what do you mean by RAID?  Another acronym?

J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: numaari on 2007 January 13, 15:49:45

<whine>But it was less than a year old...  I feel like such an ass for buying this $120 thing that was essentially disposable.</whine>
It's still under warranty, yes? If it's under warranty, no sweat. Just keep killing them...and don't expect them to be reliable. What I always do with disks is that I check the manufacturer warranty, then subject it to gruelling use in an attempt to kill it before the deadline. Then I bitch at them and get them to send a non-broken one, rinse, repeat. In the old days I could recycle a disk like 3-4 times this way before they declared that model to be out of stock and gave me a better one to kill. Lately they've started to catch wise to this, though.

Quote from: numaari on 2007 January 13, 15:49:45

Errr...  Pescado, what do you mean by RAID?  Another acronym?

Redundant Array Of Insuperior Disks, mostly. There are some people who argue that the I is "Inexpensive", but I wouldn't call a $120 disk inexpensive, especially when it's being used as an expendable unit.

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