Your motherboard blew?
You had to spend money out of your meagre savings to buy a used one?
Oh, poor you…but you better stop feeling sorry for yourself because, well, now is the right time for your “archive” external hard drive to start dying.
Oh yeah!
This is my life baby!
Constant shit after shit. Every day is an adventure.
So yeah, the external drive I use to archive stuff just started giving some funky errors, a couple of chkdsk runs later and I concluded the thing is dying, fast.
Of course, I scrambled to copy the most stuff out of it that I could.
In the meantime I found out one of my 2.5″ USB enclosures is kinda broken, I connected it to the PC and it complains about something something drive could be faster, etc. USB 2.0 port etc., since I have 2 of the things I swapped the HDD to the other one and everything was fine.
Nice, not only did my 3.5″ external HDD die, one of the 2.5″ cases died too.
Lucky, lucky, lucky…
Fortunately the 2.5″ enclosure is one of those super cheap USB 2.0 made in china ones, I will just buy a new one .
Less than 4€ on Ebay, no big loss, and I have been using those for over 6 years without issue so it’s not like they aren’t worth the money.
Thankfully it didn’t mess up the hard drive or data.
Speaking of messing up data…
After I copied everything I could out of the dying disk to other HDDs I started checking if all the files were good. Mostly by literally opening each and everyone of them, which I must admit gets boring.
Lost some stuff from 2008 that were unique copies, hate when that happens.
And then I started checking videos (I archive interesting Youtube videos and whatnot, also some older series and films that are kinda hard to find).
Imagine my face when I opened a file and what comes out is not the video I expected, but somehow a random part of an audiobook that I had on the dying drive.
“Oh boy, this is going to be fun!”
Well, long story short I guess I have to buy a new HDD to put in the USB enclosure. Thinking positively, the enclosure is working great so I can just buy a HDD.
Kinda torn between a used 500GB drive with less than 200 hours of use (and less than 20 start/stop cycles, so basically brand new) and a brand new 1TB disk.
The price to capacity ratio is about the same, the used 500GB is 19€ and the new 1TB is 40€.
Deep down I know I will probably end up buying both, the prices are too good and I can always use a extra 500GB.
Well, that’s all the ranting.