I don't know what it is but I seem to have the worst luck when it comes to hard drives these days.

The Western Digital 160GB Caviar SE that I bought in March to replace my last dead drive decided it was going to fail on me last night with a Read Element Failure. It is always great to hear the heart warming sound of the click of death.

This makes it the third hard drive to fail in a row over a span of the past two years and I always have a fan blowing on it so it wasn't a case of overheating.

I guess they don't make them like they used too as my eight to thirty gigabyte drives are still running great. I will say that this doesn't bother me too much because I use rsync to maintain a copy of my home partition on my file server.

Anyway, I have sent in for an Advanced RMA so I am hoping my new drive comes soon.

I would like to hear some hard drive recommendations from people if possible just in case this next drive dies as well.

I recently had the honor of dealing with Antec's RMA department as my NeoHE 550 power supply failed after 9 months of normal operation.

I received my RMA number three days after my initial inquiry and I was informed that I needed to give them a copy of my original receipt before they would even accept the RMA. I was able to supply a copy of it, but I thought that was kind of strange since I have never needed a receipt for an RMA with any other company.

There is never a reason why you shouldn't be continually backing up your data.
You never know when your hard drive is going to fail on you and I was the lucky pick of the draw yesterday.

This was the second 120GB Maxtor drive to die in recent years, so I decided to purchase an Western Digital 160GB Caviar SE (WD1600JB-00R) for my new drive. I have another 160GB Caviar SE (WD1600JB-00DUA3) in my file server and haven't had any problems with it so I figured it was worth a shot.

Thanks to the recent backup of my entire /home partition, I was back on my feet within minutes of installing Arch Linux.

I was going through some old discs the other day and made a discovery. I found screen shots, styles, and configuration files that dated back to mid-2001, when I was a blackbox user.

I had recently been thinking of recreating the old style I had made back then so I could use it on openbox. I thought that it was a bit of a shame that I didn't have a screen shot of it when I suddenly stumbled upon the files that I had wanted.

One of my greyhounds died a few months back leaving my other greyhound without a playmate. I adopted another greyhound a few days ago and all is good once more.

I brought my other greyhound with me to the greyhound adoption place and let her pick her own companion. I must say that it worked quite well as both like each other very much. The new one has already settled down in the house and acts like she has always lived here

Her name is Silly (It is part of her racing name and she comes to it so I won't be changing it) and she is two years old.