Sunday, July 25, 2010

Requiem for a Hard Drive

Alas, poor hard drive, I knew you well.  We met 8 years ago when I moved to the Twin Cities.  I need the companionship of a new computer and I pieced one together all by myself.  But the key ingredient was you.  I needed you to store my files, nest my operating system, and help me play my games.

Recently you became a secondary hard drive to a newer system, but you were never forgotten.  In you, I placed the faith of my Ubuntu OS and you excelled.  Helping me dual boot, my main hard drive became my secondary for merely storage, but you did more.  I used you to run Ubuntu, to perform many different tasks, and we did a grand job together.  The things I installed on you, the things we tested together.

Hard-drive

In Memoriam, 2002 – 2010

Oh, I may have formatted you several times and changed your file system around around.  You’ve seen FAT32, NTFS, EXT3 and finally EXT4.  You never complained, never gave in, you just simply complied.  I saved many a files to you, used you to help me create many DVDs.  Even though I upgraded to a laptop, you still had a special place in my heart and we still continued to see each other.

Recently though, things changed.  I had downloaded a file and went to open it to find it corrupted.  And you know who corrupted it?  You did.  After all these years, you have finally started to corrupt things around here.  All that trust we had started going down the drain.  Can you imagine the pain I felt?  To see you not be able to download my files anymore tore me apart.  But I couldn’t accept that you were developing bad sectors, could I?  Then the testing began.

I ran you through a battery of tests, read the results and refused to accept the answer.  Why does something have to fail just because it is getting old?  It doesn’t seem fair!  I tried to run programs that would fix you or at least get us past those bad sectors, but those sectors were growing.  There was no way to just quarantine those sectors.  It started to spread more voraciously than I could ever have expected.  I thought this would a long drawn out battle, but no.

One night, you just failed completely.  You simply wouldn’t boot anymore.  The system found you unreadable, unusable.  No more prolonging this battle, we were at our end.  Afterwards I would run tests to determine the cause and came back with the same results.  Old age, you see, does this.  And at some point, it just stops working.  There’s nothing more I could have done, nothing would have changed what happened.  Sometimes when it’s time, it is just time.  So now I must move on. 

It’ll be awhile before I buy another hard drive.  Moving past this is simply too rough and costs money right now.  But next time, I certainly won’t take that hard drive for granted.  I’ll be more careful with it, I’ll… naw screw it.  You damned hard drives are for downloading stuff and storing crap.  If you aren’t built up to par, tough!  I’ll use and abuse all the hard drives I want!  And by the way, the next one will be bigger and better than your measly 80 gigs of memory.  So how do you like that?

This rant was brought to you by Hard Drive Loss Veterans of American and the Ad Council.


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