On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Edwin Lee <[email protected]> wrote: > > It seems like my portable 2.5" hdd has died... now it makes a spinning noise > for after i plug it in, and stops after a while, and i can never detect it > anymore... :( > > Fortunately i had the more important stuffs copied out...
If you had not, then I have successfully made a bad hard drive start one final time by putting it in the freezer overnight. It might be worth trying if only for the practice. I did it in Denmark where we do not have humidity issues, so you may want to make sure it does not get wet when you take it out of the freezer (wrapping in a plastic bag should do the trick). Or you may be able to run the USB cable into the freezer? > Anyway, was wondering if it is because i have just started running a > VirtualBox image (need to bring Ubuntu around with me) directly out of it - > as compared to copying it to internal hdd before running? Would the constant > heavy usage have contributed to this? (Though i have to say, it's not very > new hdd, almost 5 years old.) heavy usage + being carried around = 5 years lifespan > Also, since i'll need to get a replacement, was also wondering if it would be > a better idea to get a couple of high capacity USB flash drives instead? > Would it be more reliable? (i believe flash drives do have read/write > limit/lifespan as well.) Yes. Flash drives do have limited lifespan if rewritten. There are filesystems that will try to increase the lifespan by distributing the wear (JFFS2 springs to mind). > Or is it just a bad practice to run applications off a USB device in the > first place? I would not think so. I rarely do it, but that is primarily because I never have gotten around to make a bootable linux USB-disk. > Need some expert advice, please. If you only have to get a new drive every 5 years, I think you should consider yourself lucky and just continue doing so. Flash sticks are IMO ready if you treat them as write-seldom devices. /Ole _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
