Three weeks ago tonight, my 500GB miniStack V3 started screeching something awful—clearly beginning its death throes. I ran a quick Time Machine backup, said a prayer, and hoped it would hold together until the backup finished. It did, and as soon as it was done, I pulled the drive out of service and filed an RMA request with Other World Computing, the vendor I’d bought the drive from. I got them the drive off via UPS that Saturday [it was a crazy, crazy week], and I had the replacement drive last Monday.

Except, 111GB into a 305GB file transfer, the replacement drive woke me out of a dead sleep [it had been an even longer week prior, running almost 70 hours in seven days' time]. The new drive was, too, dead. I returned it the next day, and the drive got there on Friday. Monday, my replacement shipped. It arrived today.

Anyhow, I saw that it was at the house a little before three this afternoon, so I took my “lunch” break [one of those days; I was up at 0400, so I'm fading fast now], came home, and put it into service. I was a bit surprised when the drive mounted … already labeled like I wanted, with my data on the drive. “THOSE BASTARDS!” was my first mental thought, but then I read the packing slip. Bad fan in the casing. Ahh. Makes sense, especially for a new-out-of-the-box drive, y’know?

Anyhow, seven hours later, with 305GB moved, I’ve now got tunes again. Wilco’s “Impossible Germany” has never sounded so sweet.

Predictably, this HDD failure came less than ten days after I finished getting all the music off of my old machine. The only backup I had was the Time Machine backup. I’d never really tried TM before this event, and I must say … I’m reasonably impressed. The UI is still a little non-intuitive for me, but that might be because I spend half my day on a PC and sometimes think like a PC guy even on a Mac. Either way, it works. That said, you can imagine that I’m going to get another 500GB HDD ASAP and use SuperDuper! on it. Not having my tunes has been like lopping an arm off, especially with all that’s happened in the last three weeks.