My Hard Drives, My Room(s)

4/8/2013

Today, yet another one of my storage devices died. Thankfully, it was just a 90 Gig SSD. Unfortunately, it was the boot disk on my system. Cut off from my fresh 4.5TB of storage, I was left a bit disconcerted. A little reflection brought me back to my original comparison of data storage to a living environment. I am quite passionate about organisation (and somehow constantly failing at it), especially in my room. I have tried to bring the same to my data, but never quite managed to. I've now realised the reason: I'm a hoarder.

It came up around a week ago. On my way to my uncle's place, my mother recounted tales of my grandmother. One described my grandmother's hoarding habits. While cleaning up my room (after quite a while) and replacing my bedside drawers with a smaller bedside table, I pondered over hoarding. I realised that I am a hoarder. Much of the stuff that I had collected and wrapped was utterly useless. Deciding that it was time for a change, I started picking up objects that I had no foreseeable use for. There were less than 5 items.

In the comfort of the steadiness of my current setup, I had ignored organisation of data. That, along with my hoarding habits over the past few years, has lead to bits spread over various devices, much of it pointless.

My data can be divided into the following categories:

1. Movies: Most of these are ones I would not watch more than ones, many that I won't watch even once. However, I just can't get myself to get rid of any.
2. TV Shows: Since these are episodic, they are the worse to organise. The older seasons are downloaded as a whole, but the new ones are downloaded per episode as each is released. Most of these new ones are left in download folders of old hard drives spread across various devices. Before OS reinstalls, I dump the download folders into backups on various external hard drives. For complete series, seasons are often missing. This leads to a horrible dilemma, especially since TV shows are potentially re-watchable.
3. Games: My collection of games is something I'm quite fond of. But with improving technology, it's becoming a nightmare. Many games are (or used to be) split into archives. If one goes, the whole game goes. ISOs need to be extracted and kept as is. Then are updates and patches. They end up in download folders too, spread all over, never indexed properly. In the past week itself, I've had to re-download at least three games due to patches and bad sectors.
4. Music: This is the easiest to organise in data form, especially since I'm not exactly a downlaoder.
5. Backups: This is where it all leads to. OS reinstalls have become quite frequent due to new releases, hardware updates and failing drives. Each update brings a new backup. Each backup is a new folder in an external drive with movies, TV episodes, random PDFs and downloads, applications and other crap, most of which I'll never need again.

My data is spread across various drives. Many are external, as I've come to repent. Others are big internal drives, which too I'm getting rather dubious of due to the latest developments in my failing hardware. It's like having all my objects of day-to-day use spread in all the rooms of my house. The solution is simple: clean up room by room and throw away the junk. Just the thought of it is so relaxing. But the memory of that which is lost will always haunt me from my stash of crashed drives. Maybe once I have them all replaced...


UPDATE 1: Forgive the badly written post; I was distracted and sleepy. Anyway, I have had my redemption. Today, I pulled out my bag of shame: a polythene bag filled with broken hard drives. I picked out three: my Seagate 500GB Momentus XT that crashed a few months ago (not much data there), a WD 1TB My Passport Essentials that died due to a popular hardware issue last month, taking with it around 400GB of backup and games, and the gem, a 2009 WD 320GB My Passport Studio. I registered each of them and the result was fulfilling: the first two were safely in warranty; the third had 10 DAYS of warranty left. I immediately filed for replacement. God bless RMA.

UPDATE 2: Well, I tried the Momentus XT in my PC and it worked. That will work as my primary drive. Also, Corsair responded that my SSD was out of warranty. I got a new 1TB My Passport Essentials and a 320GB WD Elements. I guess that's the best they would give me. I'm satisfied. The new drives are lying around and my data is in no better state. Lethargy has bested me once more.