Hey guys,
Thanks so much for comments, they're all helpful as usual which is what i've come to expect from this forum! Believe me I have learned my lesson and as soon as I work out the logistics of my newest back up routine, hopefully I won't be caught out again. Sounds like a few of you have had some pretty similar experiences if not worse, I guess data loss or corruption comes to us all eventually? Those USB thumb drives do seem indeed to be getting bigger and it might be good for an immediate back up solution. Although it's never happened to me personally, I have heard these flash drives can go bad too? I saw the comment on cooking the drives in the oven, that's definitely a new one to me, how did you think that one up! I believe the newest technology of these hard drives rely on fluidic bearings instead of the earlier ball bearing type. Perhaps the freezing or heating is what gets this fluid going again. Who knows?
I honestly didn't realise that hard drive warranties were so low, 1 year for some?! That's crazy. I've read that there's even a class action happening against one hard drive manufacture which seemed to have let hard drives go out with a known fault and although fixed later with a firmware update, still affected quite a few customers. The hard drive I've bought to replace this dead seagate is actually a Samsung, I had no idea they're both the same company (at least for HD manufacture)! The samsung arrived this morning and has the word 'momentus' on it, which is what my dead seagate is labelled as. I think the universe is conspiring against me. Well I wont 'write' seagate off for the moment for one bad experience, but we'll see. Says it was manufactured 12/12 so at least it's new? Not sure if that's good or bad?
Never thought of the cloud experience for back ups before, I've always worried about sharing my data with people I dont really know or i'll never meet. Maybe this is the future though, I mean.. all of my hotmail/gmail email information is stored on a server somewhere in the world and we're all used to that by now. I'm sure bill gates is an avid reader of the forum and if so bill, free cloud storage hook ups for the electrotech community members please?!
Some of the stories have been quite entertaining, especially the corporate ones about how data loss affects big business. The military ones too, especially as I can imagine how much data integrity means in that context. The CSI one made me laugh, good idea though if you could work out how to do it! It is a little worrying to hear of the failure rate of optical media such as CD drives though. I'll usually copy important stuff over to a CD/DVD and typically use Nero to burn it + verification. Then if it's really important I'll run the end result through a comparison program called 'Beyond compare'. In case any of you have never heard of it, it compares any two drives/files/folders for differences and highlights them, pretty good and well worth the money! I keep all my CD/DVD's in the spindles they came in, never thought about it before, but is the generally what you all do with them too? Didnt we (rather, NASA) send out the voyager spacecraft with information recorded on a gold disc? When it finally meets an alien in a few thousand years, will the data still be accessible? What if the hard drive controlling the space ship crashes, does it have a back up? Does THAT have a back up? I cant say for sure but I'm sure I even heard once Nasa used to send spacecraft off using the Z80? No way! So cool.
Finally just a quick update. Put the dead drive into a USB caddy and physically twisted and hand spun the drive with the power on and guess what. No more beeping. But.. now it's clicking! Great. Perhaps the twisting free'd the head from the platter which could have meant it was previously a stiction issue and now the head being free, is damaged. Hopefully whatever killed the drive is what caused the damage and not my mad wrist twisting technique. Good news though is the motor spins up fine, gives off a lovely high pitched whine when it gets going as it usually used to. So I guess the heads are bad and need to be swapped.... Am I Crazy enough to do this myself? Hmm... It would be fun...
Recent quote from Seagate after explaining the new developments results in a price reduction strangely. From £1000 for a possible seized motor (which is no longer the case), to £450 to a head swap. Who knows, if I keep messing with it, it may go down even more. However all bets are off if I do ever open it up apparantly, the charge rockets from that point.
In order to aid my next decision I've got myself a faulty drive off ebay of the same make and model as the dead seagate and so when it arrives, I'll open it up and have a tinker with it to see if im eventually skilled enough to do a head replacement in a quick enough time (hopefully under a minute) to minimise any airbourne debris landing on the platter. Probably impossible or very unlikely, maybe the cold shower idea would help! Be interested to hear if anyone's actually opened one of these things and has got a positive outcome. I've also got myself one of those ball squirty things that shoot air out of the nozzle when you squeeze them (think they're also used to clean camera lenses too) which may also help during the process to clean as i go, as well as a can of compressed air. Not sure if I can use that on the platter yet though.
Any more suggestions welcome!
Megamox
PS. Here's a 3 minute video of how the professionals perform a head swap and I guess what I'm hopefully deciding whether I'd like to attempt eventually. Seems straightforward and I'm sure I could get by without that special plastic tool comb (it's used to make sure the heads never touch). I've seen other videos where other companies slide a folded up bit of paper between the head arms to keep them separated instead. Dont have that green magnet sucker tool thing either, or even know what it's called.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVcMC8uoNYk&list=UL
Possible chance of success? Let me know what you all think! I'll also look into seeing if I can obtain access to my old university's clean room (Class 100) which does allow external visitors. I'll politely explain what I'd like to do and maybe they'll take pity on me. Not sure how they'd feel about me setting up shop on one of their benches though, even if it was for 5 minutes.
(Sorry about the long post, the thread is moving quickly!)