upgrade redux

I had been years expecting my hard drive to fail. I hardly noticed, until the end, that it was slowing down and growing noisier at the same time. I thought of it as a little shabby, maybe, but dependable.

When the world grew past each one making their own shoes, the cobbler joined that class of craftsmen that had only been shared by blacksmiths. He served royalty first and then any who could afford his services: fashion and utility. The army traveled on its stomach, but it marched the whole way in sturdy foot gear and treasured its cobbler.

The cobbler wears the worst shoes. He wears 'em 'till there's no wear left - until they're just a memory of a comfort. Just before they fall off his feet and the road imposes upon his toes, he resoles. He tightens and adjusts the uppers for the load they're meant to carry through the seasons, all the while fitting them to himself until he can bear to wear them, again. Sometimes this computer feels like an old pair of good shoes.

The 1.2 gig hard drive, that I'd paid $300 for (emergency installation included because I didn't want to wait for a warrantied replacement 3 months after purchase), died at the end of my upgrade. Win98's Power Management switched the drive off (and on) repeatedly, a regimen it had never been subjected to. Once or twice a month, maybe, to effect a cold re-boot. Left on to moderate the high humidity, this disk had been spinning 24/7 for almost six years, maybe 15,000 hours beyond it's MTBF (mean time before failure). It was pared down to running just MS Office and the operating system, which in the end filled half the drive: windows\system alone grew to 300 megabytes. It bore hard use and gave good service. It won't be missed.

The new drive is 6gig. Big enough to double-boot Linux. faster. more stable. and quieter. much, much quieter.

It should outlive the motherboard but AT&T (NEC) made them pretty robust back in 1995.

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Tuesday, November 06, 2001