Andrew's Stuff

After spending a solid 10 hours trying to get this bastard drive to work I've resigned myself to losing all my stuff, and have contacted Maxtor for an RMA number so they can fix it.

I must say that while Maxtor may make crappy drives their customer service does appear to be pretty slick. Anyone that knows me knows that I don't like making phone calls or talking to people I don't know. This applies even moreso when the "person" I'm calling is a call centre where I'll no doubt have to speak to some shitty foreigner who I can't understand and who treats me like an idiot (i.e. Acer tech support who insisted that my laptop's screen not even getting powered up, along with half the rest of the laptop not getting power, was a "software problem" and I could fix it by using their "reovery" (lovely typo by them there) disks. Oh yeah, Acer?? How am I meant to run your reovery disks when my computer DOESN'T BLOODY POST??). Anyway, in my fruitless search for a phone number on the Maxtor website I was able to submit an online form requesting support, so there should be no communication issues whatsoever. They claim they will contact me in 1-2 business days. That gives them til Friday. Watch this space, as they say.

I am now in the market for a 2x200GB RAID 1 (Mirrored) array. Looks like it'll cost me around £175 which is a little steep for what will effectively be a backup device. Although I suppose it would function rather nicely as a non-backup device since it's automatically backing itself up. Gotta love RAID 1. If I could afford it I would love to have a 4x200GB RAID 0+1 (Striped & Mirrored) array but that would add another £130 on top of the £175 I've already mentioned.

*Goes to fix a bug with the displaying of news posts in the comments page*