This year I’ve been having a bit of a nightmare with technology failing on me. My technological obituary column includes a camera, laptop charger, and no less than four (yes thats 4!) hard drives. In the last nine months I’ve laid waste to a 500GB Lacie desktop drive, a 120GB Lacie ‘Rugged’ drive, the 40GB drive that sat in my Powerbook, and finally yesterday a 120GB Formac drive.
The desktop drive was replaced under warranty and the laptop drive was 5 years old, so i guess that you could call that fair play. But two 120GB so called ‘portable’ drives went without warning having barely lived long enough to reach their first birthdays. Incidentally both failed in the same way – the boards involved with communications failed.
As my line of work is programming video for live performances i use a 120GB drive in much the same way most people will use a thumb drive. Passing large video and image files between servers is a daily if not hourly occurrence and as such i rely on my hardware to keep up with the pace.
Please can drive manufacturers start making the boards and connectors in their portable drives more robust!