re: #31 Charles Johnson

Ergh. It rained really hard Sunday night, and Monday the power blinked off in my neighborhood just for a second or so — which was apparently enough to kill an external 1Tb drive I was using as an image backup for my main boot drive. Just found out when I noticed it wasn’t showing on the desktop.

When I power up the drive it makes the dreaded clicking sound of doom. Just to make sure I’ll take it out of the enclosure and try it in a dock, but it looks fried.

1TB drives are getting so cheap it’s no big deal, just a reminder to plug the external drives and my RAID array into my battery backup.

The last resort tech trick is to wrap it in paper towels, insert it in a ziploc, and then park it in the freezer overnight. This can sometimes temporarily knit things that expired due to silicon heat death— if it does work copy everything off it quickly, because it will have a limited life span. Most folks think that high power kills electronics but really waht kills them quickest is low power. Not enough on a -5v or -12v circuit and things can heat up pretty fast from the juice trying to bridge the circuit but failing.