On Friday, the Maxtor 250Gig gave up the ghost… well actually I got fed up with it. The drive still runs, but had quite a few errors on it.

After spending pretty much all weekend trying to recover the data, all I have to show for it is just a directory listing of what used to be on the drive. All the data got scrambled. ALL of it. That was about 250 gigs of mainly movies, videos, all my mp3 music and all my pictures.

Luckly I had made a backup of the pictures and music back in Sept 05,  so I’ll be able to recover most data. I’ll have lost everything since then. This is when I am wishng I had made more backups… especially of my pictures.

Oh well.

On saturday I broke down and spent $250 and picked up 2 250gig Segate drives. The 5 year warranty should come in handy. Oddly enough the Maxtor had only a 6 month warranty. Go figure. And the drive really wasn’t all that old. MFG date was 04Mar2004.

So anyway, I’ve now got a RAID 5 array (3x250Gig drives) for a total of 466Gigs of addressable space. And if one drive fails, I’m covered. It will take about 3 hours to rebuild when a new drive is replaced (did it already) but will have the piece of mind that what happened this weekend will never happen again.

I’m at least glad that I was able to recover the dir structure of what I had, so I can try to rebuild it again. Except for the pictures, which are lost for ever.