AAARGH. Can today get any worse?
This is another one of those blogs about my ongoing hard drive saga. I know everyone loves them, so I thought I’d update with what is hopefully the conclusion of the saga.
I still haven’t got around to replacing the drive. This mainly because I was waiting to get paid, which I have now been. Er, anyway.
Today, I was once again playing around with the drives, and linux in general. I connected Windows up for a few seconds so I could get something off the drive. The bad drive kept slowing down, spinning back up, and eventually stopping, freezing the system on the boot screen. This was obviously getting worse.
I swapped both sets of cables, and then the known good drive clunked on boot-up. Hurrah! We were finally getting somewhere. It just had to be the cables.
In an unrelated incident, I had to swap the drives one more time, and as I was just about to put it back together, I finally, FINALLY found my problem. The SATA cable plug was completely knackered, to the point where it literally crumbled to bits the second I touched it…
You could even smell it was faulty. It smelled like it had been burned. I’m guessing this isn’t through the heat of the drive, but more likely the plug being damaged and the data lines arcing as they disconnected and reconnected and generating heat.
I can’t believe I actually considered the cables to be at fault, never actually bothered checking them physically, and discounted them out of any wrong-doing. What an idiot.
I could have solved this problem out months ago. I might not have even needed to replace my “original” 250Gb drive at all. When it originally went all schitzoid on me several months ago, spewing out random bad sectors for absolutely no reason. Although I did swap the cables at some point during this whole… thing, I swapped them back.
The more I type this out, the more I realise it’s the cable. A stupid, little, shitty, orange piece of cable, priced less than a fiver.
So, at the end of the day, I have probably ruined a perfectly good 500Gb drive, due to all the constant clunking of the heads, and left a 250Gb drive sat on the shelf doing nothing for 6 months.
Therefore, I’m going to put in another order at Ebuyer. Another drive (I won’t go for Samsung just in case, just in case, though I no longer believe this drive is at fault, and its problems can be blamed on the cable), and a handful of SATA cables, including of course, some spares. The old hard drives will of course serve some purpose in the future. I’m going to explore the likelihood of converting my media server over to Linux, as I don’t need very much software on that… a working VNC connection, and a way of getting the webcam working properly.
