Think of it as temporary storage
Archival. Permanent. Fiable. These words are not to be used to describe the current data storage tool commonly referred to as the hard drive. (Not to be confused with the floppy, in spite of a hard plastic shell, a confusion common among the users who call me at work).
After some shopping efforts earlier in the week, where we convinced the local computer store to sell us a new tiny hard drive (it required four phone calls by three different people, including a former employee, and a citation of my prowess in the technical sense) for one of the laptops, I set to the task of installation. The defragmentation beforehand required special tools; thank you, Bart-PE for all your assistance. Anyhow, a new drive, double in capacity, is now in place and the older drive has a portable case. As soon as I find out what happens to the Lo-Jack install, I can reformat the beastie.
So, the job took part of the morning, and as I patted myself on the back, the hard drive on another machine in the house simply stopped. A quick blue screen, a reboot, and a message that S.M.A.R.T. was not synonymous with intelligent. Money is no object when keeping computers running. Believe me. Any attempts to be objective fail when a raid is imminent… so, shopping showed a great deal at Future Shop, and there was one left in stock. Open box return, so a further 10% discount applies. I should be very frightened, but one must think of it as temporary storage.
I wonder if some day I’ll be able to build something useful out of a pile of dead tiny hard drives, some going back more than two decades. I never throw anything that valuable away; there might be valuable information that can never be retrieved by simple process. Maybe I’ll have a personal monument to the ephemerality of mass storage devices.
