All hard drives die. That is just a rule. Some die earlier than others. The hard drive in my old 486 is still kicking. Well, it would be if it was still running. It is serving as a door stop now, or some other form of modern art. An eleven month old drive is failing. I bought it last December for the new home server. I do not know if it has completely failed, or it just happens to have a couple of errors in the wrong places. So, I know have two more 500GB hard drives. Thank you CompUSA. The MTBF is something like 1.2 million hours, or a failure rate of 0.34%, depending on what you read. Apparently the eleven month old drive did not get the news. Its’ MTBF is around 8,000 hours. So if I round, it is about 1.2 million hours short of reaching its’ goal.
My goal tonight is to get the server down, and ready to be operated on tomorrow. I need to line of a spare mouse, keyboard, and monitor for it. The first two are easy. The monitor will have to be pulled from another machine. I do have a spare 19″ CRT boxed up, but I don’t want to lug that thing out. It really needs to head into the donation pile. I have other stuff for that pile too. Tomorrow I operate.