Planned and Unplanned Storage Upgrades and Replacements for 2013

We purchased a Compaq Presario B1200 series notebook (specific model was B1293TU) for my wife in the middle of 2008. We finally bought a replacement laptop in December of 2011 and gave this old one to our daughter. On New Year's Eve of 2012, after more than 4 years of heavy use, its hard drive finally failed.

We have a PC we use to store almost all our family's files, our main desktop PC which I simply named Storage. The last time this was in use was April 10, 2012. That was the day I came to the conclusion that the hard disk of our Storage PC was failing.

I bought the Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green drive of our Storage PC in February 2009 when I was first putting this PC together. After two years, I started having close calls with unreadable sectors but no loss of data.  I was still able to recondition the sectors with no lasting detected issues so I wasn't worried. I was already thinking about adding another hard disk when my plans were derailed by the sky high prices of hard drives abruptly caused by the Thailand floods of October 2011.

On April 10, 2012, after more than three years of constant use, unreadable sectors finally hit an important area, the OS partition. Although the damage wasn't major, I took the precaution of shutting down the Storage PC and putting it out of service while I decided on a replacement. My problem was that at that time, hard drive prices were still sky high because of the impact of the Thai floods, so I had to keep my cool and wait for prices to come down.

Our Storage PC has been out of commission for almost a year now. Prices have already gone down this past few months, but not yet lower than pre-flood prices.  Although I figured prices were already low enough to consider, I still didn't have the budget or the willingness to pay for a replacement, until very recently.

Unlike the Storage PC where I was the only major user and I could do without using it since I still had my netbook, the Compaq Presario B1200 was essential to my daughter. I realized that I couldn't wait as long to replace the hard drive of my daughter's laptop as I had with our Storage PC. Two weeks later, I bought an Advanced Format 1 TB Western Digital Scorpio Green drive for about $99.  I believe that price was cheaper than pre-flood prices.

I was able to format the new 1 TB drive, which had 4k byte sectors, for proper functionality with Windows XP.  I then backed up our files from the 1 TB Storage PC drive to the 1 TB WD drive and plugged it in my son's Vostro 1500 laptop.  I also backed up the files of the 250 gb Seagate Momentus drive of the Vostro 1500 and then transferred the 250 gb drive to the Compaq Presario B1200.  I then copied over the files of the old 120 gb Hitachi drive of the Compaq laptop and I was done.

By the first week of February, my daughter could use her laptop again.  It only took about a month whereas it has been 11 months since our Storage PC was kept out of commission.  This disparity finally gave me the proper perspective that it wasn't logical to keep putting off repairing our Storage PC.

From now on, I must schedule upgrading our hard drives and not wait for them to fail before replacing them.  More importantly, it shouldn't take me more than half a year for any of our PCs to be returned to a condition that my family can use and benefit from.  It's now time to buy a new 2 TB hard drive and this time it's going to be a Seagate.