Damn...

[Golgo13]

The drive on my laptop died last night, it made this horrible loud elephant sound before it died too.  Now I have to start over from scratch, and transfer a bunch of files I had backed up.   What fun!

[Tatsujin]

but in the end, still much much better than you didn't back up your files.

[FM-77]

Sucks. That has happened to me twice. What bothered me the most both times was actually that I lost save files from various games. My personal files meant nothing.

If I lose either of my drives now though, I'm dead. So no virus sending to me please.

[Tatsujin]

lost mine few month ago, but i'm already over the hill now.

still try to rescue some data, but didn't find a good prog for free yet.

[Necromancer]

That sucks it hard, but thankfully you made backups.  My next computer will have a RAID setup to avoid just such a headache; and what the hell, hard drives are cheap.

[grahf]

Ive had my laptop for years, and the hard drive makes the most horrible noise. No way its normal. The thing is louder than an old desktop harddrive. But so far, its still kickin'. I expected it to die a long time ago.

[Golgo13]

It started last night when my laptop started running INSANELY slow.  And I said to myself, "This isnt the Pentium 4 power ive grown to know and love."  So I began to run a diskcheck for errors, the check took 4 hours! it usually only takes 30 minutes.  I managed to boot the computer and windows started up very slowly, taking about 10 minutes to get to my desktop, then I threw a few files from school onto a memory stick, but I was still thinking the drive was ok because the search revealed no errors in my drive.  No less than 5 minutes after I saved those few extra files, my HD made the loudest sound ive ever heard an HD make and that was it.  Game Over.

[FM-77]

That sucks it hard, but thankfully you made backups.  My next computer will have a RAID setup to avoid just such a headache; and what the hell, hard drives are cheap.

RAID setups are worse. If one out of three (assuming you have three) hard drives fail, EVERYTHING's gone.

[offsidewing]

There are a lot of things that have gotten lost as computers have become more affordable.

Most notably, MTB.  Mean Time Between FAILURES.

Now, I may hate DOS 6.2 and love Norton Commander over Windows, but people often only care about how much storage space or transfer speed their hard drive has.  Me, I like to know how long mine's going to last. 

[Necromancer]

RAID setups are worse. If one out of three (assuming you have three) hard drives fail, EVERYTHING's gone.

The price is wrong, bitch! 

You're correct only for a striped array (RAID 0), which is for performance only.  RAID can also be set for mirroring (RAID 1) where no data is lost if either of two drives fails or RAID 5 that requires three (or more) drives.  This gives the best of both worlds - increased speed and protection from data loss.  You're still screwed if you don't replace a drive soon after a failure though, as another drive could always kick the bucket soon after the first.

[Dark Fact]

My old computer sounds like a swarm of angry wasps but it hasn't died on me.

Sucks about your lappy though.  You know where you can get a good one for cheap?

[Kitsunexus]

The drive on my laptop died last night, it made this horrible loud elephant sound before it died too.  Now I have to start over from scratch, and transfer a bunch of files I had backed up.   What fun!

I'm sorry about your laptop, but the description just gave me this hilarious mental picture of you hitting the power button and hearing this "VERRROOOOOO!" 

I've had a lot of sugar, so excuse me if this isn't as funny to you guys.

[Dark Fact]

Have you tried feeding your drive peanuts? Maybe it was just hungry.

[Golgo13]

My old computer sounds like a swarm of angry wasps but it hasn't died on me.

Sucks about your lappy though.  You know where you can get a good one for cheap?

I just got another drive for it and installed it, its an 80 gig one, not too bad, hopefully it holds out.