Hard Drive Failure
My primary podcast hard drive failed yesterday. Though it is not a terrible loss, it is quite unfortunate…
The failed drive is a Hitachi drive made in April 2009. I used to purchase Hitachi drives because that was the brand that was used in IBM ThinkPads, so I figured that they must be reliable. I stopped purchasing Hitachi drives after a bad experience, and this failed drive is one of the last that I purchased.
The drive fails to power on, so I suspect that the failure is in the
PCB “controller card.” The platters are fine, and I think that it is
very likely that the data can be recovered. The PCB uses a OA58730
LCI controller, and I have another (working!) Hitachi drive with the
same chips. After taking a fresh backup of the working drive, I tried
swapping the PCBs. With the working PCB, the failed drive spins up and
sounds fine. Unfortunately, I cannot access the data without
transferring the drive BIOS. The BIOS is stored on two chips: a
93C86WP EEPROM and a 25P10VP flash memory SOP.
These are both small 8-pin chips, and I have neither the tools nor the
skills to perform the transfer myself. I will ask around and see if
somebody can help me with the task.
I started using the drive for podcasts in 2015. I had previously stored podcasts on a drive along with various other free audio files (such as netlabel releases), and I wanted to use a separate drive for podcasts since I write to it frequently. Use of the drive was initially going to be temporary, but I ended up using it for over six years before failure! As a “temporary” drive, it is not backed up. I just received a pair of new drives in the mail, and I will be sure to regularly back up the replacement.
If I am unable to recover the data on the failed drive, the biggest loss is in organization. I meticulously organize my podcasts, using consistent filenames and ID3 metadata, with everything defined in YAML files. The majority of the data can probably be downloaded again, though there is no need to re-download all of it. There is hopefully not many podcasts newer than 2015 that are no longer available.
I checked my older drive to confirm that it is fine. I started listening to “podcasts” in 2004, so it has over ten years of data! Quite a lot of the content is no longer online. That drive is of course backed up!
This failure is a reminder that I should copy my older backups to newer drives.