After two dead disks last month, another one died on me this evening. This time it was the 400GB external drive I have attached to my Mac Mini. The data on it wasn't critical, fortunately. I'd been loading it up with ripped DVDs from our collection, so the only thing I've really lost is time.
That, and my cool. Data loss FREAKS ME OUT at the best of times. Losing three disks in the space of a month has practically got me hyperventilating.
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Now with 10% less fat!
Actually, now that I've read your post properly I'm going to stick to the EMP theory, how is Alex at physics ? I'm sure we didn't get on to electromagnetic stuff until at least high school.
Only two of the three drives were ever hooked up to the same drive controller (a USB/Firewire external enclosure), and it is gone, baby, gone. This most recent failure happened about five days after I'd installed the drive in that enclosure.
I'm still holding out a tiny sliver of hope the low-level utilities the manufacturer provides might bring it back to a fully working state, but I haven't had the heart to work on it yet. (After the Mac disk utilities were done with it, the disk was reporting itself as having a capacity of 128GB, when it should be 400. The sliver of hope is really very tiny.)
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AlistairL
Thank goodness I am well outside your obvious EMP blast radius. How do you get on with flash memory ? Do you wipe that ad-hoc too?
Or
Change that disk controller.