My Fastest PC which is used for Graphics and Music production just went out of comission.

As we all know, Hard Drives are prone to failure due to their mechanical nature, but this was a bit premature.  My Data Drive failed after 6 months of use.

This is how my System was configured. 

1 x 80 GB Main Drive where windows is installed
1 x 250GB Secondary Drive where all data is stored.

Using this method, the smaller main drive takes all the abuse from Windows writing to the hard drive on a continuious basis.

The Secondary drive is only used to store data like Bryce Files or Audio Recording.

So in theory the Data drive should last longer is it not written to so frequently.

To top it all off, this PC is not used all the time, only when I'm creating/rendering something.

Although I have some of the data backed up to other medium, my most recent works is lost.

I will be re-building the PC with a new method... I will using Raid 1.. basically two Hard Drives of identical size are written to at the same time, both drives have identical data.  If one drive failes, the other drive takes over and you can replace the failed drive and have both drives synchronized.

So this serves as a good reminder to always back you're data as you can never tell when a drive will fail.

This is the first time I've had a hard drive fail after 6 months.

been there, done that. There's 2 types of Pc users out there; the ones who have had a hard drive fail, and those who are going to...

Sorry to hear.

Most HD makers warranty their products, can you get an RMA ? Do you have the original reciept? Maybe they would consider an upgrade with a discount from the old drive? Might be worth contacting them.

When my MoBo went down it was out of warranty. Ugh!

I have definitely been down that road.  I had a hard drive stop recognizing xp and I could not boot it.  I switched it to a slave and installed xp to a fresh hd and now I can read the data at least.  I need a DVD burner to backup to.

remember me?

I just purchased a new Maxtor 320GB External USB HDD for exclusive use for backups of my laptop HDD and data files on my main external HDD. Double redundancy is a necessity these days. And for $129, very very affordable :-)