Monthly Archive for December, 2007

I don’t get it.  Five years ago if someone had a hard drive fail, it was seen as an oddity and it caused a line of questions regarding just what made it fail.  Today, it just seems commonplace.  I’ve experienced more hard drive failures in the past four years than I have the entire 24 years I’ve been using computers.

I’ll explain later why I know the timing here, but last night the hard drive in one of my laptops died.  Unfortunately, it was in the laptop I use as my main system (yes, in my jungle of machines, there is only one that I sit with it to do just about everything, such as write this blog post).  I didn’t notice until I came home for the day and opened it up.  Screen was blank, and the Caps Lock key wasn’t causing the LED to blink.  After power-cycling the laptop I was greeted with a “Disk Failure” message.  Crap!  (By the way, for those counting, this is the sixth drive I’ve had fail in the past four years.)  I could kind of tell it was coming.  This drive was under heavy load for almost four years, and over the last couple of days I noticed my laptop was acting a little odd.

Time to run to the store.  Now, I went for a vision test today, and my eyes were dilated.  No way was I driving, so I called Subratam and asked if he would mind driving me to Fry’s.  We went there, and when I got home, I threw the new drive in and booted up the Windows Home Server Recovery CD.  About an hour and a half later, it finished restoring everything and I booted right in.  The last backup was from 6 December at 3:02 am, which is why I know it died sometime overnight as last night’s 3 am backup did not occur.  The only thing that did not restore back was the fact it was using BitLocker (this makes sense, though).  I’m in the process of encrypting my drive again.  Other than this, it’s like it was before.  Hard drive is twice as big (it’s 120 GB), which is kind of nice.  I lost one and a half days worth of drive changes, but given all my data lives on the server, I really lost nothing at all.

Only catch here is the previous drive was a 7200 RPM drive and this one is a 5400 RPM drive.  Strangely, though, the Windows Experience Index test rated the 7200 drive a 4.4 and this new 5400 one a 4.5 under the disk data transfer rate test, so I won’t order a 7200 one online just yet.  Maybe technology has brought the 5400’s into a faster state… I’ll know over the next few days or so from using it.

All I can say is, “Phew!”  This could have been a lot worse.  Before I built the Windows Home Server system, I did not take regular backups despite continually recommending to others they do so (do as I say, not as I do).  Do yourself a favor and make a backup of your stuff… go buy that external hard drive you’ve been debating getting and just do it.  When you do experience a drive failure, and the “oh crap” feeling sinks in, you’ll be very glad you have that backup.  I certainly was.

Phew!  Well, I might as well say it in the beginning.  I suffered from food poisoning last Wednesday.  Given I can’t say with proof what got me sick, I’ll refrain from mentioning the suspect restaurant’s name.  I ate lunch around noon off campus with some friends from work.  About 3 pm I noticed I wasn’t feeling quite right, so I decided to head home early.  I’m glad I did.  I got off the bus and walked home, and at 4:15 I walked in the door, threw my keys on the… something… and on the couch I went.  For two hours.  I didn’t move.  I actually fell asleep for a while.  But then, around 6:20, I went upstairs and went back and forth between the bathroom and the bed for 9 hours.  Wow, the pain… it felt like I ate a Brillo pad.  Needless to say, I took sick days Thursday and Friday.

I’m still not right today.  I’m back to eating how I normally eat, but I can still tell I went through all that when I’m done eating.  At least I’m able to do things now, such as doing the laundry and tidying up around home today, although I had to take brakes now and again.  Also, let’s just say I had enough water the last few days to cover me for a week’s needs.  Lucky for me, I hit the grocery store the weekend before, so I was stocked up, and I am very glad I bought bananas on that trip.

Otherwise, really nothing to report over the last few weeks.  I am 27 now (another year… so quick), and I was going to go out Friday night for a belated celebration, until the hoopla above happened.  We’ll try again this weekend.  Oh, my sister will be here to visit in January.  That’ll be nice, although there’s so much to do and so little time she’ll be here (story of our lives, isn’t it?).  We’ll see each other during the holiday week, so at least we won’t have to play catch-up over the year… unless she reads this blog, then she knows most of it (you do read this, don’t you sis?).  We’ll be picking out some new furniture while she’s here as it’s time for me to move on from my college stuff and get some grown-up things.

I also ordered DSL service last week.  While Comcast was good, lately it’s not running up to par.  I have a suspicion the node I’m on is saturated, especially given things tend to worsen in the evenings, but of course, that’s all speculation.  In a few weeks the DSL line will be in and I’ll see how it compares.  Given I have 8/768 with Comcast, I went for 8/1 DSL service, so it should be pretty close.  Yes, yes, Comcast has PowerBoost, but even with that, my download speeds don’t hit 8 down anyway.  When I had DSL in Michigan through SBC (it’s AT&T now), it was absolutely great, so I’m hoping out here through a Covad reseller I’ll experience the same level of greatness.

I suppose that’s all I have for now.  Until next post, take care.