Junk

The 500GB external drive went out - my backup drive. Its been acting up, and I've been thinking of ways to back the data up on it, but I never seem to have everything together at the right time. When I find my dual-layer DVD's, I don't have my laptop with me, the only machine I have with a DL-burner. I powered the unit off and connected it to my mac, getting errors about bad data. XP returned an unrecognizable device. Linux regurgitated a whole host of sector errors, and the dmesg output booting into gparted live confirmed that I was in serious trouble.

Having recently pulled my 160GB iTunes drive from its external enclosure to mount it internally due to what ended up being a failing power supply on the external device, I cracked this one open as well. That's when I realized that I run so much junk hardware, that I was not going to be able to easily overcome this. Though my Antec case is rather large, its nearly full. Furthermore, purchasing when I did - SATA & PCI Express being brand new technologies - my XP box has only a single IDE interface. When I cracked the case, I found that the 500GB was SATA. Not being deterred I pulled out another project I was working on what I had recently added two 500GB drives to only to discover that they were IDE drives. My XP box has four SATA connectors, but in digging through miles of cables I keep in four containers spread throughout the attic and house, I couldn't find another SATA cable. That's when I discovered that the external drive uses SATA power as well...the Raptor in my XP box contained only the SATA data interface - no power. The other project box had SATA power on the supply, but no interfaces on the box.

All my shit is old.

And while dreams of a $3000 Mac Pro often fill my head, a $500 e-machine with a dual-core proc & 4GB of RAM is more my budget. The reason all this came about is my daughter needs a family portrait and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY PICTURES IS ON THAT DRIVE. I need a new computer. And when I get it, I'm going to splurge on a 1TB RAID vault and an external 50GB dual-layer Blu-Ray burner.

Turned out it was only a bad USB cable.

This time.