Bad news with a not-so-bad ending...

My wife called me up at work today and said the hard drive in my Rio Central was making loud "ka-chunk ka-chunk" seeking type noises every 2 seconds. So I had her power it off and thought I'd look at it when I got home. As many of you may remember, I changed out the original 40GB drive in the Rio to a Maxtor 120GB drive....I use this thing all the time, mainly with Rio receivers all around the house. I probably play music from it at least 6 hours a day during the week and 12-15 hours a day on the weekends...

So I got home, powered up the drive, and heard the same endless loop of "ka-chunk" from the drive....7,500 songs, 600 CDs or so lost in space on this hard drive. It was about 80 percent full or so...Was I panicked about all the time I spent ripping my CD collection and editing the ID tags?

The good news is that I had "sacrificed" a brand new 120 GB drive and made a duplicate of the failed drive back on 6/3. I've never been so happy in my life that I took the time, trouble, and expense to make a backup copy that just "sat there" waiting for this moment!!! I think I probably only added 10-20 CDs during the last 3 months, so it turns out that I'm not in real bad shape after all....

So right now I'm running with a "Bare bones" 40 GB drive that has about 30 CDs ripped to it...Just my favorites until I can get another drive and make a duplicate of my one good backup drive. I don't even want to play the backup drive until I can get it copied....I know it works because I tested it, but am I getting anal or what!?!?! There's nothing like losing your data to make you see the light....

Anyways, I thought I'd post a message to let folks know that your time may be coming one of these days. If you use the unit as much as I do, it might not be a bad idea to have a backup copy of that precious MP3 data....

The drive is under warranty, and I just used the Maxtor website to start the process of getting another drive shipped out.....

I'm now breathing a bit easier.....

Randy