Monday 20 February 2006

Pic of the day: Forgot to photograph it. Hopefully I will be able to photograph the replacement before too long.

Death of another Maxtor

Today during the lunch break I wandered aimlessly into the electronics shop of Telehuset. An old acquaintance who works there asked me whether he could help. I said that I was looking whether there were any sales on external hard disk drives. No, I had no idea why I was saying that or even why I was there. It's not like I was planning to spend more money on computers for the next half year or so! The guy apologized but they were just out of them right now, they had rebuilt part of the shop and were in the process of getting wares back in. They would get some Maxtor disks.

I told him that my Maxtor 250 GB external hard disk had died after only a few months, and I had later checked on Amazon's reviews and found that this was a rather common fate for it. I advised him against ordering that particular model. However, I said, the 300 GB had worked for something like 2 years now.

Actually it is more like a little over 1 year. I know, because the Maxtor 250 died on Oct 11 2004, in much the same way as my Maxtor 300 died later today. And in that entry I mention seeing the Maxtor 300 in a competing shop (the one I visited today) so I probably bought it not long after.

***

Yes, yes. I've told you before that the flow of time is sometimes reversed for me. Not quite as if I can remember the future, but just like there's a gravity pull from the future. Like sometimes the small piece of iron makes the magnet move instead of the other way around, if the magnet is perched precariously enough. Evidently this one was.

Perhaps Maxtor simply make bad hard disks. Or perhaps external disks aren't meant to run day and night, but are just glorified backup devices. I'll find out when my Western Digital disk goes south, I guess. The fact remains, however, that this was the only time I ever talked about it to anyone in the fleshworld after I bought it. I rarely even write about them. And then it crashed.

On the bright side, the device is surely covered by the minimum warranty in Norwegian consumer protection law. I believe that to be at least two years. Still, the anime on it is hardly covered. Luckily I had backed up any finished series before the move. And I haven't been able to download anything for nearly two months, because of the botched move and the glacial inertia in the phone company and the ISP. Sometimes two wrongs really make a right, or at least half a right.

***

In hopefully unrelated news, I'm slightly sick. I guess this is to be expected given my diet of the day, which includes plenty of jelly candy and fruit juice as well as a burger and then at home a pasta meal with pesto. (Although I heated the pesto to near frying and let the fat run off. It consists of more than 50% fat, which is far more than I can eat. Well, if I want more than a couple teaspoons of the stuff.) Still, I feel better than my hard disk, thank the Light. I wonder what the guy in the shop will say if I show up with it tomorrow and tell him that it died this evening.