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hard drive rings
Thursday, August 31 2017
I had a bunch of meetings today, mostly about the new store I've been working on (and that I've largely handed off to Brittany, the new frontend developer). To help with that, I started drinking kratom tea fairly early in the day. The meetings went well and were reasonably productive, and I didn't say anything too stupid, so I'd chalk up this day as a reasonably successful one, at least in the remote workplace.
Here in the reality of my laboratory, on the other hand, I found myself dealing with yet more junk equipment that should've worked but refused to. In this case it was a Rosewill 3.5 inch external SATA case I'd bought for my four terabyte network-attached storage (NAT) system, which is attached to the Katydid wifi router behind the tea pot in the laboratory's southwest corner. The reason I needed a new case was because the old one (manufactured by Orico) was driving me crazy with its insistence on being manually switched on after every power failure. Having to do that is a drag, and it was a problem when I was in Los Angeles and Gretchen couldn't watch her downloaded teevee shows (which are stored on that drive). I'd managed to talk Gretchen through the procedure of turning it back on, but who wants to have to do such a thing, especially when there are cases that don't require this. I'd hoped the new Rosewill case would do the trick. Initially it seemed promising. Though it was turned on and off with a momentary switch, it seemed to remember the state of that switch through a loss of power. Other than that, though, it didn't work at all. When on, the hard drive never spun up and never became available. Supplying power and data to a hard drive are really the main two jobs an external hard drive case has, and it couldn't even do those. I was so enraged as I stuffed it back into its packaging that I bit down the bundled mass of its wall wart's power cable, leaving permanent tooth marks. I also slashed the black paint on the aluminum chassis with a screw driver, leaving an angry silver scratch. I would be getting a refund, but not for that hour or two of my life. It could've been even worse; when removing my hard drive from the useless case, the damn thing accidentally slipped out and fell to the floor, a distance of about 16 inches (it had been between my calves). Happily it off at the time and struck the floor on a patch of carpet, so nothing bad seemed to have happened to it (and it worked fine when I powered it up), but that could've been a disaster.
Happily, I discovered that I actually have an external hard drive case on hand (manufactured by NexStar) that does exactly what I need. I'd originally rejected it, because it had seemed somehow incompatible with my particular hard drive. But it turns out it works fine; it's just got a little delay after powering up that I'd evidently been too impatient to wait through.
Several summers ago, the original hard drive attached to Katydid had been a little two point five inch 2 TB Samsung drive that had proved dismayingly unreliable after only a few months of use (I should've gotten a refund). Eventually it fell off a table while running, and never worked again. Today I finally took that dead drive apart and saw the damage: a 3/8 inch long scratch near the edge of the top side of the topmost platter. The scratch had thrown up enough particles for the platter to be flecked with about a dozen visible spots. I always save the platters and other hardware from my dead drives for some future art or lighting project, and so it was with this one. The drive had been an unusual three-platter model (usually I only see one and two-platter drives), and I found that the stainless-steel spacer rings between the platters fit perfectly on my ring fingers. So I put both of them together on my right ring finger, where, if they are comfortable, they might remain for the rest of my life.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170831 feedback
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