I bought a 500Gb hard disk for £80 last year. On 3 November, to be exact. It was a sleek LaCie Porsche drive that I bought on impulse, knowing in the back of my mind that I'd soon be using Apple's new Time Machine feature to back up all my work.
For six months it has worked like a dream, giving me the ability to restore files, or indeed the entire state of my computer, from any time back to last November. Until this morning. Because it died.
I've had hard disks behave erratically and die on me before, but it usually takes a bit longer than six months for them to perish. All disks come with an MTBF rating, or Mean Time Between Failures, which is the result of lab testing a whole batch of said drives and is often around 1.2m hours. Or 136 years. Sadly, that doesn't mean that an individual disk is guaranteed for 136 years...
But even if mine were, I'd still feel odd about returning it. I've got a disk here which is beyond repair as far as I'm concerned, but LaCie could probably get it working again. And if they did, they'd have several dozen perfect snapshots of my computer's internal hard disk which they could theoretically use to recreate my machine in an hour or so.
I'm not saying they would. It just makes me uneasy that all my accounts, personal emails, photos and goodness knows what else are sitting on it. I'm probably just being paranoid, but as it only cost £80 (as opposed to the hundreds I've forked out for hard drives in the past) I'm almost tempted to write it off and just chuck it in the bin rather than post it off somewhere. While keeping my fingers crossed that scavengers on the local rubbish tip don't have LaCie's technological knowhow.
It's amazing that storage has become so cheap and disposable, though. 10 years ago, an array of drives totalling 500Gb would have cost the best part of $25,000. And if they stopped working I'd probably be a little more upset than I am right now.
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One thing to watch out for with LaCie externals - it may appear that the drive itself is fried (won't mount, dismounts randomly etc etc), when it's actually the power supply.
I use a ton of D2 triple interface drives at work, and I thought I had a couple of casualties, but later realised that the power supplies were at fault. I've read reports online of LaCie replacing PSUs no questions asked, as it's such a well-reported problem.
Posted by: Ant | Sunday, 11 May 2008 at 06:55 PM
Why don't you invest in Apple's Time Capsule, a 500 GB or 1 TB hard drive which can be used as a wireless network base? Much more expensive but designed for compatibility with Macs and the Time Machine software, and for wireless backing up. If backing up is important and you already use Mac, what's the point of going for something so cheap? If you want something cheaper than Time Capsule but which is stylish, WesternDigital have a very good range. Buffalo is another possibility.
Posted by: Barry Stocker | Monday, 12 May 2008 at 02:20 AM
I've just been looking through earlier entries on this blog which I have just noticed for the first time. I realise now that you have reasons for being against the WesternDigiatal MyBook series and maybe to the whole genre of networked external hard drives, but I don't think these problems apply to WD's Passport series which offers upto 320gb on rather attractive and slim passport sized harddrives which can be connected via usb or firewire . Given you are using a Mac I'm still interested in why you are not using Time Capsule, which gets better consumer reviews than WD MyBook, though not as good as the Macs themself. Do you have a wireless network at home? If you do and you don't recommend a hard drive as a base, what do you recommend?
Posted by: Barry Stocker | Monday, 12 May 2008 at 02:54 AM
hi Barry,
I've got nothing against networked hard drives as such. I'm not using Time Capsule because it has annoying restrictions (see the Engadget review at tinyurl.com/56lhe9) and is only really suitable for backing up; I was using my LaCie for all manner of stuff, not just Time Machine.
I find it incredibly annoying when manufacturers make a slick new piece of kit whose specifications they boast about, only to compromise utterly on versatility, making the thing incredibly inflexible. Time Capsule, to me, looks like more of an ideal router replacement than an ideal hard drive replacement.
Anyway, I bought a Maxtor drive from PC World for £65 and I'm up and running again - but for how long, who can say...
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Monday, 12 May 2008 at 08:22 AM