Widescreen Gaming Forum

Just thought I would share this painful experience:

I had my Personal Home PC HDD crash on Sunday night. "Not too worry" I hear you all say, "Surely Johnny would have backed up his shet wouldn't he?" Indeed I did, albeit 2 months ago but still good. Away I go and plug in the backup on an external hard drive to take a look.

20 seconds later my wife points to the what should of been obvious fact that FKING SMOKE IS ARISING FROM THE EXTERNAL HDD DEVICE!!!!!!!!!!! :O The external hard drive decided to shat itself and the internal electronics board and the hard drive and send unpleasant fumes (yes I did smell them for reasons I have not worked out, perhaps I thought they might smell like...narcotics or something) of rubber and solder wafting into the home office like a dodgy disco dance floor. Lovely. There goes the back up plan eh boys?

In Australia, Data Recovery services are not cheap, as I think the price will be >$1,000.

So I have made peace with the universe and am preparing to say good bye to that chapter of my life. Out with the old, in with the new.

So now, I am going to live in the clouds and make backups there. This will not happen again.





With death comes new life, so now that I have to reinstall a new OP system, I may as well upgrade my entire system :twothumb

Items Ordered:
1 x 120GB OCZ Vertex II E 3.5" SATA 2 Solid State Drive (SSD) @$219ea$219.00
1 x DDR3 4GB (2x2G) G.Skill 1600MHz PC12800 Dual Channel RAM Kit @$49ea$49.00
1 x Intel S1155 Core i5 2500K 3.3GHz Quad Core CPU UNLOCKED Bundle Price* @$209ea$209.00
1 x ASUS S1155 P8P67-M-PRO V3 Motherboard B3 Stepping @$149ea$149.00

TBA:
1x 560 GTX ti; (slighty cheaper and quieter) OR
1x Radeon 6950 (eye finity!!!)

Above depending on air flow priorities.

First of all I am really sorry you lost everything :(

I would of said go for 8GB RAM, but I am sure that it will be fine, the rest of the system looks great. I am considering an nV card for CUDA support, but I would probably go with the 6950 (a 2GB if possible for eyefinity), because think you need 2 of the 560's to get nV surround, where as you can do eyefinity with just one AMD card.

Hope that helped a bit!!!

Man, that's terrible. :(

Hey mate, you're not far from me it seems! 8)

Sucks about the situation, at least you have a good path from here though. Very nice kit!

BTW is it just the power supply or control circuitry that smoked? The HDD might be intact inside despite smelling like smoke, have you tried ripping it out of the enclosure and connecting it to a PC? Willing to have a look if you want, got an old PC I can test it on.

Hey thanks for the kinds words guys.

I have decided to send away for a free quote to retrived data, worst case it costs me $20 in frieght to try it.

Yeah, I did try that. I will also keep trying it as well. Not that I think it should matter, but I will ask anyway. The backup drive is a WesternDigital 250GB, but it has an apple logo on it. Does that mean it might not want to play ball with my PC?

Hey Timmeh, ComputerAlliance QLD, paid for parts BPAY on Tuesday, acknowledged receipt of payment on Wednesday and advised 2-3 ETA, Thursday new items arrived at my office. ... ... :0

Scrambling tonight to get everything ready to go.

Hey Timmeh, ComputerAlliance QLD, paid for parts BPAY on Tuesday, acknowledged receipt of payment on Wednesday and advised 2-3 ETA, Thursday new items arrived at my office. ... ... :0

Scrambling tonight to get everything ready to go.

Brilliant! It's good to know some businesses out there still care about being good at what they do. :onethumb

Also, they gave me 2RAMSTICKS by mistake as well, so now I got 8GB instead of 4GB...

Then again, they must have appreciated my business enough to give it to me for free. Huzzah!

I ended up ordering the same CPU/Mobo/RAM (albeit 8GB) from the same people. Can't wait.