Being rewarded for buying locally

Talk about a relief.

It's been one of those weeks. I get back from vacation and try to get back to work, but find I've got some issues. I can't get data in our app synced with our server (we're using a new sync approach which is complete with NDAs so I can't tell you anything about it, at least yet), and then I start having issues with our VSTO customizations for Excel documents. I keep getting an error in GDI+ with nary a hint of stack trace of our code.

After much wrangling and reinstalling, I manage to get my PC back in order and working again. Something apparently got me fouled up with some other installing/reinstalling I'd been doing lately. HOWEVER I then find out that one of our business design team members is also having issues with Excel that are similar to mine. After much wrangling yesterday, I go home muttering something about "Format C:" as her issue is clearly one of something being fundamentally fouled up on her machine. (Today, we found out it was some third party stuff causing an issue in Excel, nothing to do with our app other than our app being victimized by bad behavior of this other app.)

Then I get home. And then I fire up my home PC. And then I get "there has been an error on Volume 0". In short... hard drive problem that's looking pretty serious. Windows hangs up. Then I restart. Windows seems to start, but hangs up again. Oh boy. The drive seems fouled up and my confidence that running CHKDSK would solve all the issues was pretty low. Unfortunately, I had decided to RAID 0 the disks so that my two physical hard disks appeared as one big one to windows. I still don't know why I did that instead of RAID 1/mirroring. 640GB should be big enough for a while for me. Anyway, I'm thinking I'm up the creek unless I buy TWO more 640 GB disks and then create two RAID 0's and mirror the two, then take the bad disk out and use the good original disk as a spare.

I decide that's a mess. Let me see first if I can get away with using a single 1.5 TB drive as mirror of the the original pair of connected drives so I can get a back up and then go from there. Now, I have no expectation of this working, mind you. I'm figuring my drive controller will expect each end of the mirror to have the same physical characteristics. Anyway, I pop over to Fry's to get a new drive. I know that I'll spend more money at Fry's than at Newegg, but my philosophy these days is to buy local and I'm also nearly in panic b/c I'm thinking I'll have to redo a lot of junk on this machine or may lose stuff. I try to back up important stuff to my eternal NAS drive, but there's always a chance of missing something.

I decide that what I'll do is buy TWO 1.5 TB drives (at 160 a pop) and then attempt to use the first one to mirror the existing drives (which are about 1.2 TB combined), take the old drives off, and mirror the second new drive with the first new drive.

Keep in mind, I have no expectation that my disk controller will even let me get away with this.

I get home with two new Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drives. RETAIL packaged Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drives (the old ones were Western Digital, just based on one arbitrary instance of bad luck, I figure I'll try Seagate this go round). And then the good Lord for some reason actually stops me and gets me to RTM (read the manual). It's then that I realize the CD that came with the drive isn't just a coaster. No, not at all. The CD has a program built to order for what I need... DiscWizard, complete with the ability to clone an existing drive. Furthermore, this program does this based on the logical volume (what Windows sees as the drive), not the physical disks. Therefore, these retail boxes I got at a higher price than I would have gotten "OEM" drives from Newegg just saved my bacon. I don't need to worry about whether the disk controller can support two different physical set ups for each copy of a mirror between drives. I can copy the existing data to the new drive, take out the old ones, and boot up from the new one.

In just about half an hour, I have the first new disk in, the utility has run, and the old disks are out. Back in action. I'll worry about setting up the mirror tomorrow... meanwhile, one big sigh of relief.

And looking at Newegg, I spent less than $60 extra over the same drives in OEM packaging. The software was worth that much to me!