George Washington's Computer

[billroper]

I went upstairs to try to clean off my desk so that I could do some work on the taxes. The computer was complaining that it needed to install Windows updates, so I let it do so and reboot.

And the RAID array reported that one of the drives had failed. Happily, I had a spare on the shelf, as I'd bought two drives during the last disk failure -- the first on-line, the second from a local store when I decided not to wait to restore the mirror. So I popped in the replacement drive and it's happily getting rebuilt now.

Interestingly, the failed drive is still under warranty according to the Seagate site. But they suggest testing it with SeaTools first before sending it back, as they'll bounce it if it passes their tests and charge you for shipping. So the SeaTools tests are happily running on the drive in a USB carrier and finding nothing wrong.

Mind you, Windows refuses to actually recognize the drive, but why should that mean that it isn't working?

*sigh*

Update: I just checked. This computer is nearly six years old now. I don't know when I've had a six year old computer still running, as usually I replace them on a shorter cycle. It's just not clear that I'd actually improve performance significantly by going to a new build and reinstalling everything is a real pain.

Comments

[kyril.livejournal.com]

Unless a drive dies early in its warranty period (less common now as the drives I buy don't have 5 year warranties any more) it's time to buy a new drive (even cross-shipping takes a while with your machine possibly out of commission if it wasn't RAIDed) or two (if RAID-1), as you're not likely to get the same model drive back so you'd be running a mismatched pair.

RAID-5, on the other hand, it's a more difficult choice...