Hard Drive Giveaway #4: I've Got 3350 GB of Storage to Give Away

[Jason Dunn]

<p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1250370548.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>OK, here we go with contest #4! If you haven't already read up on why I'm giving these hard drives away, <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/94866/hard-drive-giveaway-i-ve-got-3350-gb-of-storage-to-give-away.html" target="_blank">please check out the first contest giveaway</a>.</p><p>All you have to do is post a message telling me if you've ever experienced a hard drive crash. When was it? What did you lose, if anything? Or have you been fortunate enough to never have a hard drive tank on you?</p><p>I'll select the winner at random. Once you win one of the contests, you're out of the running for the next contests in this series. Each winner will be contacted via private forum message and they'll have 72 hours to respond to claim their prize - so be sure email notifications are turned on for your forum account. The last contest I ran someone missed out on winning a prize because they didn't reply to my message for two weeks!</p><p>The drive I'm giving away in this second contest is a <strong>Seagate 7200.10 400 GB (SATA)</strong>. This contest will close on Tuesday the 22nd of September at 12 noon GMT -7. Enter now!</p>

[uzziah0]

I had my external 160 GB LaCie die a slow death.
At first it sounded noisy, so I left it off unless I needed it. Then, when I had it on it would get loud and slow at transferring files.
As I started to copy the files to my internal HD (and juggle to make room for things and copy stuff to memory cards and DVDs) I first copied the important stuff pictures.
I think I lost some movies I ripped and some of the music I ripped, but I had all the source DVDs and CDs so nothing lost except time.

[paschott]

Worst one ever - I was running Stacker way back when a 40 MB hard drive was a reasonable size (and expensive). I was working on some code in C++ to turn in for a project due the next day - one worth a large portion of our grade. My stacked file crashed hard, taking all of my work with it. No backups at the time, and a really, really bad grade that semester. Outside of that, I've been pretty blessed to not have any major crashes. The hard drive or system has generally warned me before a crash happened.

I've read the horror stories from others, though. I hope that never happens to me.

Related to this, I remember a customer sending in a tape to have us try to restore the database for their company. Their motor had burned out on their tape drive. We put it in ours and burned out a motor as well. Couldn't figure it out until we opened up the tape casing and saw that the little hook that the tape drives use to pull in the tape had broken off at some point.

[KevinM10]

Remember the days of MFM and RLL hard drives with controller cards?

I had a 40M (yes Meg) HDD that died, sort of. All data lost.
I used some utility to mark all the bad sectors on one set of heads.

Presto! I had a 20M hard drive and back up and running...

[hoffm11]

Never had a hard drive crash! I need something to backup my data incase it does happen! ;)

[Cold Flame]

All you have to do is post a message telling me if you've ever experienced a hard drive crash. When was it? What did you lose, if anything? Or have you been fortunate enough to never have a hard drive tank on you?

I had a harddrive crash on me; the head started skipping off the platter. Thankfully I just lost my OS install and all installed programs. I had a very recent backup, so very little else was lost thankfully.

[dtanderson]

I have had one hard drive crash. I did not lose much important information since I had most of it backed up to cds. I mostly lost some of my music files.

[Bob Christensen]

I haven't had a hard drive crash, but both my daughter and son have older computers that crashed. Important data was backed up and/or able to be recovered from the drives after installing them as secondary drives in another computer.

[Joel Crane]

I've lost 3 hard drives now, but I've never lost any critical data due to backups.

[x.clay]

The hard drive in my old HP mini tower went out on me a couple of years back. It happened somewhat suddenly and I lost a bunch of digital photos. I have an external backup drive and I burn all my photos to DVDs now.

[Reid Kistler]

Lost 2 old MicroScience 60MB (yes, MB....) RLL drives.... back in the day :o -- failed within a few months of each other.

Fortunately, all of the DATA was backed up, either to other HDs & / or 5 1/4" Floppies....:D

And, of course, reinstalling the apps was a LOT simpler than under Windows!

[asims]

I had a hard drive crash on me once. That ticking sound is one of the worst sounds one could ever hear coming from a computer. I don't remember what I lost.

[moonwalker_v2]

Hi,
I had my terrible Hard Drive crash on my Comapq Laptop, 2 years back with all of my labour of 4 years lost in it. Since then I had developed a good habbit of backing up the important things on my external hard disks. A must have...

[andrew_lee]

I've hard a few hard drive failures of different kinds, the last several years ago. Fortunately, I've lost little important data, because I keep copies of important files on both my desktop and laptop computers. Sometimes, it was clear that the drive was about to die, and I was able to copy everything to another drive.

[Master Loon]

I lost a hard drive due to pure failure. lost a lot os stuff. didnt have a back up. I would use this as the back up. Using DVD for now

[Kacey Green]

I've lost a handful of drives over the years, sometimes they were harmless failures, other times I lost media, software or projects (both work and school)

[jlafount]

I've lost a few hard drives over the years. Fortunately they have been mostly inconveniences in time wasted to buy a new drive and rebuild. I've lost a few files here and there but nothing substantial

[oguime]

I've never had a hard drive crash, and do not make regular backups at all!

But I know I've just been lucky so far and I am building a WHS.

[gschlau]

The drive in my server hasn't died yet, but any day...

[firedog]

Yes, I had an "electrical event" occur just as my HD was starting to write something, and the drive got totally zapped. Simply stopped functioning immediately, and I lost all my data.

Since then I have battery backup and also keep several backups of my most important files.

[Ploobers]

I'd replace the hard drive on my server that just died a week ago.

[tabi13]

If I win this drive, I will use it as a dedicated photo backup because I realised that my pictures are the most valuable data on my Home PC

[Jason Dunn]

The contest is now over...and the winner is asims (http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/members/asims/). Thanks to everyone for entering! Stay tuned for the next contest...

[asims]

Woohoo! This is great!:D Thanks so very much, Jason!
Now I just need an external case to make this a portable drive. I want to use this to create backups for at least five of the computers we have in our house. Any suggestions on which external case I should get?