|
My hard drive is now eligible for disability
This is kind of an odd problem. I imagine there's no solution except buying a new hard drive, but I figured I'd ask anyway before forking over the $200 and spending a weekend copying files.
Two weeks ago, I'm ripping a DVD to my hard drive, a 200gb Western Digital 8mb cache. It's my second hard drive, and I use it exclusively for storage of mp3s and temporary space while backing up my DVDs. During the session, I start to play an mp3, the way I know I had done many times while working with DVDs, and the mp3 playback is horribly muddled, so I turn it off. The DVD takes well over an hour to copy, and won't burn properly.
Ever since that night my read/write speeds from the drive are pathetic, capped at about 1 meg/sec, often much slower. Mp3s skip really badly, to the point where I have to have Winamp buffer the entire file to memory (which thankfully is easy to do, Winamp is awesome).
My theory was that I just wore the drive out, using it as temporary space for DVD ripping, which can involve writing and then deleting about 20 gigs of space per session.
While, like I said, I've pretty much written this drive off as useless, I'm wondering if anyone thinks my hypothesis about why it broke is correct. I don't want to ruin another drive like this...
|