It came! (Warning–boring geeky stuff)
My new HD came by Fed-Ex today and I can’t wait to install it. Maybe my HD/computer saga will finally be over and I’ll be able to get back to what I need to do on my desktop rather than try and do everything on my laptop.
The saga, you ask? Well, after about three years the HD in my main desktop died a slow and tragic death. Had I been more observant I would’ve realized that it was in its last months when my backup software wouldn’t do an automatic backup unless I okay’d it after its initial scan. It would return a “disk has multiple errors” message and I just went mindlessly on my way backing up the corrupted files and all. It finally died and it took me trying to fix it to realize that, duh, it was the drive and there was nothing more I could do. Thankfully, despite some corrupted files from the affected sectors, I did have backup to most everything and I can’t stress enough how important it is. The HD is not original to the machine and I don’t remember exactly when or from where I bought it so I don’t think I’m going to bother pursuing the warranty. I probably have the receipt somewhere so maybe I will try and dig it out but I wouldn’t know where to begin with getting warranty service. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.
I thought I could just swap out the older computer with a newer one I had hanging around with a pristine HD and just transfer everything to that. Well, that works best if the backup drive is the same size or smaller than the main internal one. It didn’t dawn on me until I hooked everything up and tried to transfer it over that the computer I switched to had only an 80GB drive. When I bought it I figured that I’d just buy a new drive and save money with the purchase. Since I’ve used it maybe twice, I forgot I did that and the backup drive is twice the size. It’s twice the size and has more info on it than the internal drive can take. Drat.
Since then I’ve been using my laptop as my main computer and that’s fine but there is info on my desktop that I need and I want to do some more work on autism awareness designs for the Cafe Press store. I have Photoshop on my laptop but it slows the system down considerably and the core images and designs (and idea notes!) are on the other computer. What I needed was a new HD and soon. The problem? Money of course.
Because Slickdeals is evil, I knew that I’d find some sort of HD deal there. I came across one but got a thorough education on the difference between SATA and PATA drives. The HD on sale was a SATA. I, of course, need a PATA. This summer the “new” computer will be two years old and because it’s not exactly a Cray, it still has the PATA technology. That’s okay. It’s not a big deal to me. I’m nowhere near a gamer. I simply had to search out a suitable drive that would be compatible with my machine. What I found was a Seagate 400GB Barracuda. It’s amazing how quickly the price goes down per GB. It was on sale Friday so I got it for less than what the site is showing now. I ordered it from Yesmicro.com on Friday night and it just got here a little while ago. If you’re wondering, I had great service from the company and fast delivery (no special upgraded delivery speed). I’m very pleased.
Is that the end? Of course not. I thought to myself, “Self, now whatever shall we do about backup? Now we’ll have 400GB to deal with! Our old 160GB HD will not do!” Yup. That’s the beginning of trouble right there. Again, I had some good luck finding an external on sale. Had these drives been not on sale, I’d have not bought them. God bless you, Slickdeals! I found the Seagate 500GB Freeagent ULC at Fry’s on sale with free shipping.
These two drives will have me set for years I think. I don’t download or edit video nor do I have a billion songs stored so even with images I’ll have plenty of room for everything and a backup drive sufficient for it all. And even if I suddenly do get into video or whatever, it’ll still be plenty. The only thing I’m in the market for if a great deal comes up is some more memory. I hold on to computers for a good while and had my old drive not crapped out, I’d still be using the machine. Hell, the newer computer was also an insane Slickdeals deal. So was the laptop. I refuse to pay full price.
As for the old computer, I can swap the damaged drive out of that one and put the HD currently in the newer one in there. I also have the old-old machine with ‘98 on it that I need to extract info off of and then reformat to give to the kids to play with. The current external I can use to back up the older computer and the laptop. I don’t much care about the kids’ computer. Did someone say network?
