Repair or Replace?

By Jerry Pournelle

May 22, 2006

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To summarize from last week: We were down at the beach house when the hard drive on Lisabetta, my HP Compaq TabletPC, failed badly enough that the system wouldn't boot. I managed to recover from that, and all was working well, but drive failures can't be overlooked.

Repair or Replace?

I had several options. One was to go to Steve Gibson's web site, get SpinRite, and use that to see just what was wrong with Lisabetta's hard drive, and whether SpinRite could put things right again. Long time readers will recall that I strongly recommend Gibson's Shields Up testing whenever you make any changes in your network connection setup. Gibson can sometimes be a bit of an alarmist, but it's dangerous out there, and just because you're a bit paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. In any event, SpinRite has a great reputation, and has been useful for many years.

There were several objections to that. First, SpinRite works to find and mark disk surface flaws. It does a good job of that, but my problems seemed heat related, which meant it was likely that we had motor or electronics problems. SpinRite works a disk pretty hard, and might actually do more damage than good in this situation. Second, no matter what SpinRite did and reported, I would always be uneasy about going on the road with a laptop whose drive had failed once. Finally, disk drives are cheap. In the old days when drives cost a great deal more, it was worth the time and effort to restore them; but they are cheap now and for me that's not a cost effective use of my time.

Better to replace the drive.

Replace With What?

Lisabetta came with a 40-GB Toshiba drive, the 60-GB version not being available when I bought her. That 40 GB was getting crowded, and it was time to upgrade anyway. I could get the 60-GB Toshiba for $88. That seemed so reasonable that I ordered one before leaving the beach. I was sure it would work.

When I got home I found a lot of e-mail advising me on the latest developments in laptop disk drives.

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