Legit Reviews

In 2008 I experienced two hard failures that sucked, but happened at times when I wasn't on a tight deadline. I just got in some new hardware on Saturday morning and am leaving for CES on Tuesday at 5am. That gives me two days to get a full review done on a new product including picture taking, photo editing, layout, writing, benchmarking, charts and editing... If that doesn't seem daunting enough I'm trying to rollout a fresh layout for the front page by tomorrow that will feature all new graphics and I still have to pack and finish up a marketing kit for the show to make Legit Reviews stays one of the top hardware review sites in america...

Yesterday two things happened that sucked... Number 1, I am sick... sore throat, sinus pressure, headache and crap is draining like no other... That means I'm going to be sick at the show, which sucks as I can hardly talk. Number 2, in the middle of benchmarking yesterday my hard drive blew up... This is a video I took when the system locked up... I heard the clicking so I didn't power it down and took a few seconds of video showing the last time I saw windows on this drive. The drive is shot, so all my data was indeed lost and all 15 of the PC games have to be re-installed and activated. (which took me 7 hours to re-install yesterday)...

What kind of drive was it and how old?

That would be a Velociraptor drive... 5-6 months old tops, ouch man, ouch.

FZ1 wrote:What kind of drive was it and how old?

Another WD VelociRaptor hard drive.... I had two of the original prototypes die, but this is the first regular one to bite the dust. The timing of it just sucked though... I mean who really wants to sit around for 7-8 hours when sick re-installing everything... If it wasn't the video card test drive it wouldn't have been so bad, but no dice.

Man, that sucks. I've never had a drive die on me (knock on wood). In fact last night, I just backed up all my pictures and music to a portable HDD and brought it in the office for safe keeping and I backup my OS regularly. With the price of storage these days, there's really no excuse not to.

The biggest rub is the full day it takes to reinstall the system and games, update and activate the system and games.

3 velociraptors crapping out on you is just bad luck. Wonder what their fail rate is like 'in the wild'.

You should look into cloning your freshly installed disks for quick backup retrieval (and get into the swing of regular backups). If you have a dedicated machine, Clonezilla is relatively easy to use for cloning/restoring images.

Dan

DMB2000uk wrote:3 velociraptors crapping out on you is just bad luck. Wonder what their fail rate is like 'in the wild'.

You should look into cloning your freshly installed disks for quick backup retrieval (and get into the swing of regular backups). If you have a dedicated machine, Clonezilla is relatively easy to use for cloning/restoring images.

Dan

I ordered in a NAS that should be here when I get back and i'm going to put all my games on that with the updates... I'm not doing it the best way, but i've been lucky with drives I guess.

God that sucks b**ls!! I've had only 1 raptor go down in a year out of ~50 installed. 150 GB went down ironically just as we were installing Acronis backup software. WD replaced right away and fortunately was able to save all critical data. Lost some music files but customer was OK with it. Was able to image the drive before it went belly up MUCH better than losing ALL data

Jack

wow that does have to be tough!! That is the very reason i have invested a lot of time in backups and making images of my computer. My reinstall time went from ~4hours to about 1hr with almost no human interference!

All I can say is one word...

ACRONIS!