I went to open a folder that had some of my photos in it, and to my dismay found that most all of the files were unreadable. The folders were there, but the name of the files looked like hieroglyphics and symbols. Time for a new external hard drive. I currently have 8 external hard drives: 1 Maxtor 250GB, 4 Western Digital 1TB, 1 Iomega 1TB 1 Western Digital 500GB, 1 Simplex 300GB.
The drive that had the unreadable images was one of the WD 1TB drive. I unplugged it, then plugged it in again, and I was able to read all of the photos. I checked my backups of that drive, and guess what. All of the other drives were backed up yesterday or the day before. But of course the one that I was having problems with hadn't been backed up for more than a month.
I plugged the bad drive back in, and woala - all of my files were readable again. So I immediately started a backup. It ran all night, and was still running this morning. But when I checked it out, again some of the files (most of the files) were unreadable. And of course the same with the backup - it was just backing up the bad files. So I stopped the backup and went out and bought two new external hard drives.
I looked online and found a WD 1TB for $110. A great price. A year ago they were selling for $300. I looked at what the price would be at my local Best Buy store. They were the same price. The shipping would cost more than the sales tax, so I went to the store.
But they didn't have any, even though the website said they did. I ended up purchasing two 1.5TB Seagate drives for $129 each. One for the WD drive that was having problems, and one to replace the Iomega drive that was also making noise. I am now in the process of moving files from the soon to die drives, to the new drives.
11/24/2009
I got an email from a friend that said that the same external hard drive is available at Costco for $109.00. Day late and $20 short!
11/28/2009
One of my new Seagate hard drives is making a clicking noise. Doesn't sound good. I disconnected it, and Monday I will try to see about getting a replacement. One small problem: for some reason I can't find the receipt for the purchase. Hopefully the warranty I filled out online will allow me to get a replacement.
11/30/2009
I needed to get something off of the Seagate drive that I had disconnected, so I plugged it back in. It hasn't made any noise since. So now I am using it to hold all of my People Photos, and the other Seagate drive to hold all of my Salt Lake Photos. I use two of the WD drives to back up the two Seagate drives. I back up my C drive to another WD drive, and finally all my old photos are on the Maxtor drive and I back it up to a WD drive.
Whenever I download images from my camera's CompactFlash card, I use Adobe Lightroom. I have it set to copy all of the images I download onto a backup drive. I use the Seagate drive for this also.
