Backing forward

So, you all remember my new hard drive, right? Well, as it turns out, there's much more to the story.

When I bought my 160-gig LaCie hard drive several years ago I decided to make it my primary boot volume, in case my internal hard drive died. And sure enough, in the winter of 2004, my trusty blue iMac gave up its fanless ghost, and died in a quite literal puff of smoke on a chilly February evening. Thankfully, everything on the computer was stored on my trusty external drive, which I had purchased only a few months prior. So when my eMac arrived about two weeks later, fresh from Apple's Scratch'n'Dent store, all I did was plug my drive into one of its Firewire 400 ports and voila!. Instant Computing, just as it had always been.

Oddly, though, the LaCie drive has always had this weird problem with (don't laugh) sounding funny. Hard drive platters usually spin around at 7,200 revolutions per minute, which, over the course of several years, adds up to quite a great deal of revolutions (and, coincidentally, a great deal of minutes). Inevitably, something will leave its rocker, so to speak, and problems will surface. Well, this drive will sometimes start to make an undulating high-pitched sound as it spins, almost as if it imagines it were a tiny digital police siren. When this happens I usually a) freak out, b) break into a cold sweat, c) thank the Lord I do nightly backups, and d) wait for it to stop. It usually does, and I resume my computing without a care in the world, and having learned nary a lesson from the incident.

Anyway, last Sunday things went all haywire, and the poor hard drive looked as if it were finally giving up on this world. In a fit of panic I called my brother Andy, who always has an answer for these sorts of things, and, over the course of the next twenty-four hours, successfully migrated everything to our new 320-gigger. Not bad.

So, having been told off by my hard drive one last time, I have finally put it out to pasture. It now rests quietly beside my desk as it has for years, its glowing blue power light barely illuminated, as if to remind me that it has earned its retirement and will be dozing quietly, if I don't mind. But should I need it for one last storage mission, I'm sure it will be happy to comply in its own grumpy, cantankerous way.