Hey, you remember how I bought a Maxtor 250GB SATA hard drive back around June 2004, and then it failed in June 2005, one week before the warranty expired? I got it replaced and posted about how happy I was with Maxtor for their service, in spite of the fact that their drive died in less than a year.

I think I might revise my opinion. That replacement drive just died again, only ten months after replacement. And this time, the three-month warranty they gave me on the new drive has long since expired, so I'm out of luck. Awesome.

This was the drive where I kept all my large files: my 60GB MP3 collection, my 30GB of photos, all the old files from past computers dating back to high school, etc. Fortunately, my photos are backed up to another machine automatically every 4 hours, and most of my MP3s are also on my Nomad MP3 player, so those aren't lost.

It's kind of ironic — I'm usually paranoid about losing things, so up until about four days ago, I always made sure to keep my Nomad and my local collection of MP3s in sync, so that I always had things stored in two places in case one failed or was lost. But the 60GB drive in the Nomad filled up, and when I bought two new CDs a few days ago, I had to grudgingly delete a few albums from the Nomad to get the new ones to fit. I thought to myself, "At least this is safer than having the files only on the fragile and vulnerable Nomad", and I reassured myself that it would only be until I could afford a larger drive for the Nomad. And then as soon as I take that step out of safety and delete them from the Nomad, the drive in my desktop computer fails. He knew what was going on, that bastard. Still, it's obviously better to lose two or three albums than to lose all 893 of them.

But it really sucks to lose all those old files from high school. Old photos, IM conversations, programming assignments from Comp Sci classes in college, etc. Bah.

I think I'll get a Seagate this time around.