My harddrive sounds like a Sparkling Violetear

What do the Maxtor 5000DV external harddrive and the Sparking Violetear have in common? The answer should be nothing. One is a piece of junk, the other a beautiful hummingbird of South America.

Sparkling Violetears tend to be numerous, and very noisy. They give a metallic chipping with great vigor as they defend their territories in the forest. To my ear, I began to imagine this noise as sounding like a workcrew building a railroad, constantly hammering at the metal.

The similarity I discovered was that my external harddrive, when it utterly failed, sounded like a Sparkling Violetear. After googling, I tried sticking the harddrive in the freezer for a little while and then plugging it back in. (The cold can contract the parts, making it work again). The harddrive was extremely cold and at first, it just spun and nothing happened. When it finally warmed up enough, the sound it made sounded like an old dot-matrix printer. Coming from a harddrive, that’s not much better than a railroad workcrew.

Most of what was on this drive I have other places, but I lost some data. The moral of this story? If you’ve got an external harddrive for backup purposes, don’t put your only copy of data on it!