[X] My Assistant

[tedstryk]

Yes, it happened again. The good news is that, after the bitter experience of the crash at the end of 2005, I had plenty of backups. The drive that crashed was the drive that I use to store HST data. There were only a few of my own projects stored on it, and I have recovered most of them (I got it to limp along for a little while). So this crash is more of an annoyance (especially given that obtaining HST data is time-consuming). Any tips on getting an external hard drive working? For the record , it was my own stupid fault. I was cleaning the area I keep it and pushed it up against a file cabinet to get it out of the way. Then I moved some other stuff in front of it. What that did was block all its vents, and it overheated.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Yeah - I'd say that giving it a new home in a $30 stand alone external SATA USB enclosure will probably do the job - and even if it doesn't - they're useful things to have anyway

Incidentally, my experience of really heavy use of external SATA drives in USB-connected enclosures is really bad (in contrast, using them for occasional backups is OK). Apparently, the enclosure's electronics usually start failing in a few months (or maybe I've been unlucky). In contrast, I'm now using an external drive in an enclosure that has a SATA interface and it has been working for about 18 months now without a glitch.

So these days I don't use external USB-connected drives, except for taking backups. I use external SATA-connected drives and a RAID box.

[tedstryk]

For key data - in other words, products I have processed and hard to get data (in other words, data that can't be re-downloaded from somewhere) - I use SATA drives but keep triplicate copies. I recovered the most key project-in-progress from the old drive this morning ....my December 1990 HST Mars set. The first attempt largely missed (and landed on a nasty part of the WFPC chip), the second attempt is the more famous image, and the last one is by far the best quality (there was so much gunk in WFPC PC chip images - I have no idea what it is) that the quality really does vary depending on where the image fell. This was not true for the Wide Field chips). I put in order from right to left for cosmetic reasons (the half - image looks a bit better on the end).