Another Harddisk Failure

It seems like another of my harddisks is on the brink of failure. This time, it is the Western Digital that I am using to archive my stuff. Fortunately, the critical stuff like photos are being redundantly backed up, so the losses there are minimal. Even now, the critical parts of the archive are being moved away before the harddisk dies for good.

Of course, this does make me wonder. I do believe that it is a good idea to redundantly back everything up, preferably on a harddisk. While it will undoubtedly fail as 4 of my own have so far, doing so affords a rather more convenient option than a stack of CDs, which will have to be slotted in one after another just to verify data integrity. However, I do wonder at the interestingly high rate of hardware failure. 4 harddisks seems like a rather low MTBF, though of course it can be attributed to the possibility that I use my computer rather more than many other people.

For future reference, my current method to back up the folders quickly while the harddisk is dying is to manually move all folders over one by one. This creates an individual copy dialog. Since it is expected that most if not all folders have some sort of major malfunction, the errors will be isolated to the folder's dialog instead of stopping the entire copy process. Granted, this method is still fairly destructive given that the harddisk is failing, and I expect that the reliability will be compromised later in the process. Thus, I proceed to copy the most critical elements first, and the less important ones later. In the event of truly critical data, it would probably be wiser to approach a data recovery specialist, but given the casual nature of my storage that is quite unnecessary.

Right now I feel somewhat fortunate that a computer fair is coming to town, and that will likely allow me to purchase replacement storage at a discount. The next decision is whether I should go RAID this time, or continue with manual backups. The problem with RAID is that if there were an error in copying somehow, it is not unreasonable to expect that the error be faithfully reproduced depending on the RAID array used. This will be something that I have to carefully consider for my next backup choice. Ah, well.

On a side note, the headphone port on my speakers appears to be dying as well. Only the bass notes play through it now, necessitating that I plug my phones directly into a splitter, instead of using that oh so nice extension. Now...are my speakers still under warranty...? Given the high failure rate, I do usually get my money's worth on warranties.