The WD Caviar Black drive that I bought to replace the dead WDC Blue has died itself now – SMART reported 9 sectors it couldn’t reallocate before the thing just died completely. Oh I love backups!

So now I’m sending two drives back to the ebay seller for refund, as WDC’s RMA procedure was too complicated across two continents.

The problem now is what drive to buy – I think Western Digital suck these days, Samsung I’ll never touch again, so that leaves Seagate or possibly SSD, but the “economy” SSD drives from OCZ/Kingston are 65ukp for 32Gb, but at least with no moving parts or heat issues there can’t be much to go wrong with them I guess, plus read speeds are faster than HDD.

In the meantime I’m working off of my fileserver – installed Nessus, gSTM, gnote, knockd, GnuPG2 and Thunderbird and everything is mostly ok, I had VirtualBox, Firefox and Flash working before of course, no Skype though. All the versions are a bit old on Ubuntu though, but with my main box out of action I’m loathe to try a 9.10 to 10.04 upgrade on the fileserver! I could use my old Pentium4 which is running Fedora13 but its not encrypted and is 32-Bit.

I upgraded my F12 laptop to F13 and now it won’t work if its plugged into the docking station, even killing cpuspeed and Compiz doesn’t fix it. So I think I’ll just stick to WinXP.