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

Isn't it nice that they made the drive easy to replace instead of trying to prevent you from doing it and having to send the unit in for service.

It is nice....You can see a photo of my Central at the bottom of the first page of posts in the Technical section of the board (attachment to my post). I have the hard drive sitting on top of the unit in a removable enclosure. So that makes it a pretty easy replacement...

Randy