Life Less Literary

Over the past nine months or so, I’ve suffered three hard disk failures (another one went for good this morning). Prior to that, I’ve been computing for over ten years without a single failure. What has brought all this on? Are hard disks getting flakier? Am I just making heavier use of them? Is it because I built my own system this time around (about two years ago) and did a crap job of it? Is it because, for various reasons, I never switch my PC off these days? Is my system running too hot?

Well, at least with this latest failure (and I think the one before that), the latter reason seems likely. When I opened up the box to see what was wrong, I was amazed to find the edges of the hard disk units hotter than the centre of the sun (quite a lot hotter). I replaced my motherboard about six months ago (because prior to that, for about a year I had been suffering occasional reboots and other strange errors, which I diagnosed as being probably caused by a faulty IDE controller). Unfortunately, when I got the new motherboard out of the box I discovered it only had one three-pin power connector for a fan (my old board had two). I hooked up one fan (at least, I’m fairly sure I did…) and made a mental note to buy myself a power splitter as soon as I had a chance. Which, of course, I never did. And subsequently, it seems that I have accidentally or deliberately unplugged the sole remaining fan and forgotten to plug it back in. So my system was running, complete with about five hard disks and a couple of CD/DVD drives, with just the CPU and power supply fans to cool it (plus a couple of small fans on individual hard drive caddies), no air intake/outlet fans for the case. Hence, unsurprisingly, things got hot. I thought I had some kinda detector on the BIOS which was supposed to warn me when this kinda thing is going to happen, but either it wasn’t working properly or the part of the case where the detector is situated never got hot enough. It did seem to be in particular the part of the case where the hard disks were all crammed together (which is well away from the motherboard) that was sizzling.

So, I headed down to PC World to try and make an emergency power-splitter purchase. They didn’t have any, so instead I bought a fan which comes with an adapter to run off a disk-drive power plug (and I think they undercharged me: at least something good happened today). Came home and plugged it all in. I had a slim hope that, once the system had cooled down, the disk drive might come back online. No such luck.

Amazingly, I have so far been fortunate in what I’ve lost during these crashes. The first disk to go was a RAID mirror of my data drive, so nothing gone there. The second was my “junk” drive which, although it contained one or two things which I didn’t have elsewhere (like archives of old applications, and a couple of DVD movies waiting to burn) had nothing vital on it. The third was my MP3 drive which, although I lost a few files through bad sectors or mis-indexed blocks before it went for good, I managed to back up onto another drive once I saw which way it was headed. But I’m sure my “luck” can’t hold out. I really must burn some DVDs of my last three years digital photography, or else I’m really going to regret it.