Hard *drive*, not hard core
Today the hard drive of my work laptop got sick and died. At least that’s how I picture it. It wasn’t an immediate death, no shot to the head or head-on collision; but it went relatively fast, considering that everything seemed fine on Friday. I guess it was more like a viral infection that came up this morning and quickly lead to a high and fatal fever.
I must admit with some pride that every single laptop I have ever used has suffered hard drive failure. My very first laptop was a Sony Vaio ultra-thin 12.1″, the first of its kind on the market back in ‘99; of all the laptops I have ever had, it was by far of the best quality. It took a good 3 years before I managed to run that hard drive into the ground, and if I would have de-frag’d a bit less often, I think it would have lasted even longer; I learned my lesson. After that I picked up another Sony but sold it within a year; the hard drive on that died on the next owner but I’m sure I contributed to its demise. Then I bought an Acer and - you know the quality we can expect from them - it was in the first 120 days that the hard drive on it succumbed. Two years later, the replacement hard drive I had gotten under warranty also went under. Less than a year ago, the work laptop I had gotten second-hand for work started having issues after about 2 years of use, and the particular laptop that died today was only 6 months old so it doesn’t speak much for the quality of this particular brand.
To the credit of these laptop manufacturers: they are not built for serious hard drive endangerment. And that is definitely what I put them through. On Friday my paging file was over 1.5 GB large because the thing simply doesn’t have enough memory for all the apps I run for my work. Add on top of that all the recompilations I do when programming, and the hard drives probably get 300-500% more use than on average.
Anyway, it just goes to show: they’re hard drives, not hard core.