Spin Spin Spin
CYwolf told me about a neat tool that reads the low-level diagnostic information in your hard drive so you can see how well it is performing and if it is about to go bad. Apparently most drives have the S.M.A.R.T.* support necessary to report this diagnostic information. Some tools that can read S.M.A.R.T. data are SpeedFan and DiskCheckup. Well, after checking out my drives, the Western Digitals are all fine. A few bad sectors here and there, and a handful of read/write errors. No big deal. SpeedFan gives them a Fitness value of 90% or higher. The 160 GB Maxtor SATA drive? The one I thought might be giving me troubles in my last install of Windows? Fitness of 38%! Soft read errors -- the kind it can correct, but still -- everywhere! CRC errors in the controller! It's even getting close to the bad sector limit. This is the hard evidence I needed to RMA the drive. Hopefully it's the drive itself and not the model... I can't get a refund from Newegg at this point: they'll just send me a new drive. In the future I think I'll be buying Western Digital instead of Maxtor. This is my first Maxtor to go bad** but the Western Digitals perform so much better and make the same amount of noise.
* S.M.A.R.T means Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. More information on google and at everything2.
** I have some that are over five years old!
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I have two dead IBM hard drives, and between myself, Grue, and my college roommate, IBM drives are 0 for 7.
Haven't had any problems my 2x120gb IDE WD or my 200gbSATA WD so far.
Heh, that's kinda funny. I used to have an IBM drive too (the deathstar: click and the data is gone). They used to have such a good name for reliability, but not anymore...
I just had both a WD and a Maxtor crap out on me. Plugged it back in and found nothing but unallocated space. Wondering if prehaps the FAT files are just gone
WolfPhantom
Where ya been, man?
Where do I begin? I'll have to type an essay to get you up to speed, but in short my life has been pretty rough with the exception of finding an incredible woman whom I love and going to marry this August 22nd. I'll have to find a picture and post for all to see. We shoot our engagement photos this Friday, so I should have those in a couple of weeks.
Career-wise things have been up and down. I have mostly recently been working with Circuit City for the last year, and have an interview tomorrow morning for a sales manager position which will pay a hella-lot better than what I'm making right now.
My computer "face-time" has been severely limited with Courtney in my life now. I haven't even looked at a line of code in years. My "certification" in C++ flopped, and then I was stupid enough to try again for a MCSE/MCDBA certification which I attained prep-class for and never took the tests. Although it seems like a very lame excuse I have recently begun to wonder that if my lack of completing the testing had to do with level of difficult or challenge it presented. It is not completely unlike me to show like regard to something that comes so easily to me; HELL, that was my last 6-7 years of school. My grades in school were poor not because I couldn't get the material, but it wasn't presented as much of a challenge. I'm no shrink, and may just be full of shit, but I think I excell better in environments where I'm challenged more and the tasks isn't so easy to accomplish. Sure, there were professional reasons no one wanted to take a chance and hire a young and green programmer with no college degree or work experience, but from a introspective angle I think it was just not enough for me. I enjoy working with people in the food/service and retail industry. I don't have to be a programmer. I'm not a failure if I am a sales manager, or later a store director. As sad as it is that I spent close to $23k to figure that out, I think that is where I should be; at least for now.
Sorry I've sorta ranted on and on. I check your site every so often and read what's going on in your life, and miss the stupid nights and conversations we've had. I wish you the best of luck, and hope we can still stay in loose contact.