Subtitled: Brand name hard drive enclosures should last longer than a year.
This is just a short little rant today. The next thing that failed me was my hard drive. I have a little external hard drive. It’s the result of the death of my old computer. Shortly before it died I’d sunk some money into it (I mean of course, I did, when else does your old computer die but when you’ve just put money in to make it last another year). So I took my brand new hard drive and bought an external enclosure for it both to ease the transfer process and so that my investment wouldn’t have been entirely wasted.
After a cascade of events, I ended up buying a nice sturdy aluminum MacAlly enclosure for almost $40 at retail because I needed it right then. It worked perfectly for a year and lately I’ve taken to using the drive to offload things that I want to be able to access on the road but don’t need all the time so I can off load in order to free up space on my already full internal drive. Mostly movies, older pictures in my Aperture library (Can I say how much I love that I can now offload the originals of some pictures while keeping low resolution stand-ins for offline viewing in the library? Pop my drive back in and they’re all there just as if I hadn’t off loaded them.), and a game that I’ve taken to playing.
While Sasha was here I took some time to offload some more pictures and when she left I decided that to console myself I’d have a nice long game playing session. So I plugged my drive back in and… Absolutely nothing happened. The drive seemed to power on as normal, but nothing I could do could make Mallory (my new computer) give any evidence that she had any idea that a hard drive had been plugged in. No drive utilities could recognize that there was a drive attached to scan.
So I figured either the drive was damaged beyond my ability to repair with the utilities I had or the enclosure had died. So I bought a brand new, cheap, Bytecc enclosure for about $19. It’s not quite as pretty, but it’s aluminum. It’s compact. And it even comes with a very nice carrying case that I didn’t expect. Worked perfect right away. No problems with the filesystem or anything. Hopefully this will be the end of my worries, but I still see a second LaCie hard drive in my future.
I’ll say it again: A retail enclosure should last longer than a year. It’s as simple as that.
