Be Careful with External USB HDDs

[Ricey]

Its partially my fault for not having a UPS in my bedroom. I have a media center setup in my bedroom with a miniITX machine and a USB external HDD for media storage. There's nothing elaborate on the HDD, or should I say there *was* nothing much on the HDD, but it was a WD 1TD model and *had* about 840 GB of movies and mp3s. Thankfully everything's double backed up with multiple layers of redundancy.

Yesterday, there was a daytime power interruption because of snow fall and then the icing of power lines. I don't know for sure, but power probably went off and back on for a couple of 1/2 second intervals.

The bottom line is I spend last night trying my best to rescue the HDD. I didn't care about the data. All I wanted was for the HDD to be resuscitated. BIOS recognizes the drive, but when windows boots real slow in compatibility mode, its bad news.

I tried several methods in several machines. One program told me that the CMOS on the HDD was b0rked. I knew that was super bad news. In desperation after two hours of trying, I did a low level format. I guess that was like putting a bullet in the head of a person who was shot in the chest roflmao.

A 1TB WD HDD bites the dust. Its one of those fast models too.. and I didn't buy it at the dirt cheap $99 price it is right now.

[RedRaider]

Thanks for the 411, Ricey...:up:

[Xilikon]

Suck to hear this. Hope you can get it replaced under warranty, knowing that you're unsure if it is due to the brownouts or just a coincidental hdd failure ?

[Ricey]

Honestly, I have no idea. I'm going to try my best to go replace the HDD, but I'm not holding my breathe there. Its highly unlikely its HDD failure. When my wife and i got home last night, all the computers were off, which means that there was a genuine power interruption or one hell of a power surge.

I'm most worried about the high dollar LCD screens.

[Baleful]

Wow that really sucks man, I hope everything else made it out ok.

[Ricey]

Everything else was ok because most of it was on APC UPSes. Those APC units aren't exactly the most appealing things to look at, and definitely not approved by the aesthetics gestapo (wife). As it is, plasma TV in bedroom was almost vetoed. I had to get expensive and worthless Bose lifestyle system to be as small and unintrusive looking as possible.