On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 18:06:34 -0800, "Lew Hodgett"
wrote:

My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


The drives can shut down, but only if you've gone into the Power
configuration and told it to. Depending on what you use the
computerfor, the "no activity" timeouts can range from a couple of
minutes for the monitor and the hard drive(s) to whatever you need -
when I'm downloading new maps for the GPS, I set the drive timeout for
several hours because it's s-l-o-w.

I'm currently testing some solid state drives (SSD) for durability.
One is in a laptop that's on 24/7 (network monitor), so I'll get an
actual "in use" lifetime for it. Another will be the primary drive
foir a desktop that's also on most of the time. The biggest
improvement is in drive access - booting the laptop takes about half
as long as with the original drive.