My 2Tb Western Digital Caviar Green is dying – 1305 unfixable sectors! Off to RMA land for that, when it comes back its being relogated to “backup in the cupboard” drive.

I’ve spent the last 12 hours or so trying to back up the 1.2Tb of data to other drives – luckily I still have an unused 1Tb WDC Caviar Black in the cupboard (the last RMA!) and some free space on my 1.5Tb WDC Green.

I’m replacing it with two Hitachi XL2000 external drives which I’m going to remove from their USB2 enclosure and mount the drives internally – as under the hood they are apparently Deskstar 7K2000 drives, which are 7200rpm SATA disks with 32Mb cache, and they’re not stupid 4k AFD drives like WDC’s offerings. It will invalidate the 2-year warranty, but HDD warranties are pretty pointless as you only get the same old shitty drives back again, its not like a refund.

I ended up getting one from Tesco for £57 using the £10 off £50 code TDX-KLH4, and then another one using the £10 off £75 code TDX-MNGK and buying a pack of 100 CD-R’s to make up the difference. So 4Tb of storage and some CD’s for £127 for in-store pickup is not too shabby.

I’ve also ordered a 96Gb Kingston V+100 SSD drive for the fileserver to replace its ancient 250Gb WDC Caviar Blue, for £80, plus a new PSU with a 135mm fan, and a SATA dock. Blimey the accountant will be pleased at all the expenses and VAT receipts!