More Awesome Than You!

I have two Seagate portable hard drives - one is 160GB, the other is 80GB.  I didn't know any better and defragmented one of them, so I expected that it's screwed up...

But the other has just puked on me.  It shows up under My Computer, I just can't access it.  Occasionally it makes a high-pitched bleep.  Last night it took an *age* to transfer files onto it, but I thought it might just be because it was getting full.

I've never been sure exactly how to treat these.  I know not to defrag them, but I assumed it's ok to do a disc cleanup on them.  What the hell did I do wrong and how can I fix it?

It is a splode. Hard drives these days have very limited lifespans, particularly portables that you rattle and bang about. You should probably RAID them nowadays.

<whine>But it was less than a year old...  I feel like such an ass for buying this $120 thing that was essentially disposable.</whine>

Is there any way to make them last longer?  Should I just burn everything onto disc and access it from there?  (Can't install more memory into the 'puter because I just can't  :-\ )  I don't want to go back to wielding a huge binder of cd-roms, but I'll do what I have to.  What a colossal PITA.

Errr...  Pescado, what do you mean by RAID?  Another acronym?

It's still under warranty, yes? If it's under warranty, no sweat. Just keep killing them...and don't expect them to be reliable. What I always do with disks is that I check the manufacturer warranty, then subject it to gruelling use in an attempt to kill it before the deadline. Then I bitch at them and get them to send a non-broken one, rinse, repeat. In the old days I could recycle a disk like 3-4 times this way before they declared that model to be out of stock and gave me a better one to kill. Lately they've started to catch wise to this, though.

Redundant Array Of Insuperior Disks, mostly. There are some people who argue that the I is "Inexpensive", but I wouldn't call a $120 disk inexpensive, especially when it's being used as an expendable unit.