The power cable was too short to have the drive sitting on the coffee table my laptop was on so I sat it on the ground next to the table, figuring it can't fall if it's on the ground, right? After backing it up I reinstalled Vista without breaking a sweat and began pulling my files back over, which would have taken an hour moving at a whopping 19 mb/s tops.
Awhile later during the process of moving my files back to my HDD, I shifted my laptop and one of the cables tugged the drive which was sitting on the carpet as I said earlier. The drive tipped onto is side and started making a terrible grinding sound. I jumped up and removed power to the drive. I set the drive on the table in front of me, not remotely wanting to plug it back in to test its functionality; I knew the reality of the situation.
The combination of a poor, top heavy design, a cheap harddrive, and a young mind caused the destruction and loss of a half-terabyte drive, and more importantly, 300 gigabytes of my fathers irreplaceable photos, financial documentation, and topography files for his work, etc.
It is, or it was a Seagate Freeagent MSeries 500gb external harddrive. As you can see, it sits on a very light, 2.5 inch wide by maybe 5 long by 1 high base. The drive portion itself is much larger and considerably heavier, not to mention it stands up on its side. I know drives are NOT supposed to be able to handle any type of impact, but an external drive SHOULD. It should be able to fall off a table and survive; mine tipped over about 4 inches on its side onto CARPET.
I called Seagate's data recovery company today, the tech said a remote retrieval would cost a base price off $499 under the condition that your OS can recognize the drive. (Really Seagate? Really? If my OS can recognize the drive I'll get the files myself.) But I guess that's if you mistakenly delete files and the retrieval service attempts to read hidden files that are marked to be overwritten.
The second option he explained was to ship the drive to a lab and have it repaired in a class 100 clean room where a vacuum is created to prevent any debris from contacting the platters. Price: $750 - $3,500...I hung up the phone.
So that's whats up with Matrix. Advice: don't buy Seagate, go Maxtor or Western Digital, or better yet, buy an external drive that lays on its side.
Rule of thumb: if gravity can cause the drive/xbox/any electronic device of importance to move in any way, there is a chance for failure.
Note to the man: if you talk dad anytime soon DON'T mention that I was able to recover my files. I told him I lost my stuff too when I told him about it; he'd be very upset if he knew I didn't lose anything.
