Well you probably noticed again that I was out for quite sometime. Well that was because my Hard Disk decided to conk out. Sheesh, they sure don't make them like they used to anymore. I bought a Western Digital 1TB in 2011 and a few days back I couldn't access my drives anymore. So I did a reboot and the thing didn't want to fire up anymore. I did a re-install and during the reformat phase I couldn't do a thorough format of Drive C (it would hang.)
Well not that I was surprised. Last year I knew that the drive was going to die out already and that there were already a lot of broken sectors in drive C when after a few months I kept having to reformat the drive due to missing system files. As a precaution I bought an external drive and was transferring files to that drive already.
The good thing was that as of that point only drive C was affected and not the other partitions where the important files were kept. So after buying a new hard disk I went to the dirty task of transferring files. Took me about a day and some change to copy all the files.
Most of the large files were precious videos and pictures of my family. Lesson learned was to religiously reduce these files. I usually use ffmpeg to change our videos to a more compressed (yet still high quality) format for easy storage, but yeah there was a slip there and I had not compressed videos that I was supposed to so I paid for it with the long transfer times.
Good thing too that this happened after the Holidays, saved a chunk of change in the price of the hard disk because of deflated prices after the Christmas Season. This time I bought a 1TB Hard Drive by Toshiba. Compared to my Western Digital, this has 32Mb cache as opposed to the previous 64Mb. I read in Wired (forgot the link or was it in Reddit?) that Toshiba drives last longer after some comparison tests with other Hard Drives. Well I guess I'll see in a couple of months whether this is true or not.
