Hay. Malas naman talaga o. I went home last night, turned on my PC, and wondered why it wouldn’t detect my new S-ATA hard disk and why there was some weird clicking noises when I boot the PC up. It seemed that the hard disk crashed. The brand-spanking-new hard disk. The 5-year Seagate warranty sticker on the hard disk mocks me.

Remember the 3.3 GB music collection I mentioned a few days ago? Gone. Most of my project files? In limbo.

I’m posting this entry now using my old PC and where I’m doing damage assessment. Good thing I still have a backup of this blog’s software. And thank God I haven’t deleted many of my personal documents from this PC. The most important file I have is my MS Excel accounting sheet where I exercise my financial OC-ness by recording each and every transaction that goes through my wallet. I have to reconstruct about a month’s worth of data (lucky that I keep all my receipts).

Sigh. In all my years of experience with computers, this is the first time I had a hard disk die on me. Heck, even my almost 10-year old 1.7 GB hard disk is still up and running and donated to the village association’s finance department.

I was naïve to think that the new hard drive would be fault-free for at least a few years. So I stored many of my files there and deleted the original copies. Unluckily, I got bitten by the early-failure bug.

Recall your engineering economics 101. Hardware failure has roughly three phases, illustrated in the graph below. The graph shows the probability of failure of a product in a product line versus time. The first phase in the product line’s lifetime is characterized by a high failure rate. This is due to manufacturing defects and things like that that should’ve been eliminated by QA. The second phase is a relatively stable period where the surviving items work reliably. Then the third phase is indicated by a gradually rising failure rate due to age and deterioration.

It seems I got one of the pieces that got past QA. Hmmmph.

I’d better institute a weekly backup system once I get a replacement hard disk (the 5-year warranty had better be good for something) this weekend. And I’m writing down the serial number so that I can hopefully get a hard drive from a different production run.

Hay. Kainis.