Things That Work
Hat check girl: "Goodness! What lovely diamonds!" Mae West: "Goodness had nothin' to do with it, dearie." - "Night After Night", 1932
Sadly, the home server's Maxtor DiamondMax Plus HDD has died. The log reports have been sending scary SMART errors for the past several days. The kind of thing a sysadmin dreads: unreadable and uncorrectable sectors. This bit of hardware has been in service - non-stop - for the past twenty two years! It's older than the average college graduate and even in it's failing state contains more useful knowledge, too.
The drive dates from a time when people still bragged about CPUs and the amount of RAM in their desktop computer. And jumper settings. Have you be around long enough to remember setting those? How about IRQ jumpers for modems? Good times, good times. All that's invisible now. And how about those scary words printed right on the drive!
Once upon a time this DiamondMax was the main drive, religiously backed up to tape. It finished out its service as a "scratch" drive. A place to dump non-critical and temporary files so if it failed, something I expected it to do years ago, there's no real loss of data. The drive is so old I needed an IDE-to-SATA adapter in order to use it in the most recent incarnation of the home server.
I paid about $100 for this 160GB drive in 2003, or about $175 in today's dollars and replaced it with a faster 2TB SSD drive for half that amount. That's 12.5 times the storage space for half the price. Moore's Law is a beautiful thing. The way I roll with material things is to use them until they absolutely fail or are no longer safe to use, no matter what it is - computer bits, automobiles, tools, dishes, clothes, whatever. The secret to benefiting from a long life for material stuff is to buy quality and then take care of it.
"Things That Work" last updated on 2025.05.23.
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