Well, it was inevitable, but two nights ago my Western Digital MyBook 1TB drive finally shit the bed on me. Luckily, that drive was my backup drive and there was no data loss – just a lot of swearing and the pain of having to find a replacement.

From day one with the MyBook I had delayed write failures, numerous reformat sessions, chkdsks and lockups. These started to increase during the last 6 months, and I knew that she was going to go down for the count once and for all – very soon. With the MyBook TB versions, Western Digital (in all their wisdom – and probably in an attempt to keep things extra cheap) decided to throw two of their Caviar 500GB Sata drives into an enclosure and raid them up with their own controller card. I knew this when I purchased the drive(s) about two years ago and should have known better, but at the time they were the cheapest 1TB solution that was out there, so yeah – I bit. The old saying, “You get what you pay for” always seems to bite me in the ass.

After dissection, it appears that one of the hard drives failed and there was no way to fix the unit as a whole. But the other 500GB drive was still good, so I’m hanging on to that one – might use it as an internal spare. WD Caviar drives aren’t inherently bad… in my experience, they’ve been pretty reliable when used as single drives. My honest opinion is that I think WD’s raid controller screwed something up, data got out of sync and the second drive was fried.

Since I was super paranoid about losing my images, music and other data, I knew the next step was finding a replacement drive as quickly as possible. But which one? How much space did I need? What about backups? My working drives were already 50-75% full…do I get new ones? I sat down, did the calculations, and within ten minutes I knew I was in some trouble and was going to need a lot of room.

About 4TB’s of room, to be exact, in order to account for backups. My photos had taken up almost half of the terabyte drive that failed, and other data was pushing at least another 350-400GB. And those numbers weren’t going to suddenly get smaller anytime soon. The kicker with figuring this crap out is that you have to double everything you think you’re going to need, just so you can back it all up. Redundancy is key, but redundancy can also get expensive.

Having the drives delivered was out of the question. While I may have been able to get a better deal online, I really didn’t want to take the chance and wait 3-4 days, or have to deal with a return if one arrived dead. With my “DeMott Karma”, I knew exactly what would happen… One night, I’d come home and fire up one of my working drives to edit photos, the thing would die and I’d be left with vapor, leaving all my digital files gone like farts in the wind.  The only alternative was to go local, so I proceeded to check stock online at CircuitCity, making sure I stayed the hell away from any WD branded drives.

As it turns out, they had Maxtor OneTouch 1TB drives in-stock that carried a 5yr warranty, *and* they were on sale. Another bonus was that after some research, I found out that the drives inside the enclosures were actually 7200rpm Seagate Barracudas – and were single 1TB drives – no raid, no dual jimmy-rigged shit like the WD. In other words, these were solid. I was sold in a heartbeat.

On my lunch break I waltzed in to CircuitCity, asked where the drives were located, and proceeded to clear out their remaining stock. They had exactly 4 left and I grabbed them all. I swear there were whispers as I left. Nobody there could believe any rational human would need 4 terabytes of storage. They all looked at me like I had lobsters coming out of my ears or had a serious porn problem. The rather large black lady working security at the door didn’t even know “What the hell a terabyte was”, and I didn’t have the energy to try and explain it to her. Her suggestion: “Baby… for almost a thousand dollahs’, you shoulda juss damnwell bought a new computer!” I just nodded, kept walking and said “Yes, that’s right…”

The way I’ve tried to justify it is that I won’t need another hard drive for at least the next 3-5 years, provided these things don’t fail on me *and* I keep producing photos at my current rate + size. All four fit nicely on my desk like a row of books, purring away perfectly and quietly. Two of the drives function as my working drives, and the other two serve as backups which get sync’d nightly. I have yet to figure out an off-site solution, but Amazon’s S3 will undoubtedly be involved. Time will tell how this setup works out, but for now, the Maxtors seem to be working as advertised.