My 80Gb drive died earlier this evening.

It’s toast. When Disk Warrior says it’s dead, it’s dead.

30gb of MP3s were on there.

I haven’t seen my CDs since February. They were never unpacked after we moved and I’m not even sure where they are right now. Not to mention probably four years of great music filched from friends, Napster and GNUtella. That was one really diverse collection.

poof.

There were likely also some old projects backed up from my previous powerbook which might not be anywhere else. Thankfully I had everything else in multiple places and the important stuff backed up.

I was planning to do a big data cleanup/consolidation next month. Of course I probably would have used that drive to do it. Actually I’m taking a sigh of relief that I didn’t get around to that, who knows how much more would have been on there.

Should I find solace in the fact that I’m not alone? Here’s another dead Western Digital 80Gb drive, and another crashed Western Digital 80Gb drive. This Amazon page has a few user reviews of dead Western Digital drives. Western Digital’s forums are also filled with complaints about Western Digital hard drives failing.

And finally, Best and Worst hard drives from the data recovery company Drive Service Company. Guess which company is the worst. If anyone is going to know which drives are horrible, it will be the people who try to recover them. I wish I’d read that sooner.

I was supposed to get some work done tonight, that didn’t happen.

Update, May 2003: I was eventually able to recover most everything on the drive through a combination of Disk Warrior, Norton Utilities, Disk First Aid and FSCK. Not fun.

Another of the Western Digital 80gb drives has failed, meaning two of three in less than 18 months.