Anyone care to recommend a reliable brand of hard drive? Failing that, do I really want to have to replace a drive every year? I have now possibly (the data still seems to be there, just the directory is jumbled) lost two drives, both made by Maxtor in the past 6 months. Given that I have another that has been in service for i-dunno-how-many in a different machine, I’m thinking it’s not so much the drive as possible how it’s attached. The troubled ones (one is just mechanically dead) were both in external FireWire enclosures. Once I lost the first and suspected overheating, the other has been in an open enclosure. The room is cool, like mid 6os, so I doubt that’s an issue.
A real downside to FireWire enclosures is that you don’t get any SMART monitoring, as you on internal drives. That might have saved me. Alas.
I have to get something, if for no other purpose than to copy all the restored stuff onto. But that drive has been holding backups in a quick and dirty rsync-based arrangement and I’m sure I want to retain the ability to do that going forward.
So do I keep faith in Maxtor? Do I try another brand?
<updated> the iMac we bought late last year has a massive 250 Gb drive, so DataRescue is sucking everything it can off the drive and restoring it there.
Looks like it’s finding a lot of stuff, since I hope it was just a corrupt catalog. Still not sure how trustworthy the drive is.
And all I wanted to do was cue up some music so I could work on NaNoWriMo stuff. gah.