One of the three parallel IDE drives remaining in my computer is dying. I’m not sure which at the moment, since they’re all in a span array and I’m more concerned with getting all of my precious music and videos off of them. I’d been meaning to do it for some time, knowing that at least one of those drives had been acting funny and that the disk span was, well, fault intolerant. But I just kept putting it off. Well, today, after a spree of delayed-write failed messages, the urgency of this matter became clear.
I’m tempted to just do away with these Parallel ATA drive altogether. I’m certain the newest of the three is fine, so I’ll definitely find it a new home if it leaves my computer. The other two I don’t trust quite so much (they’re the same model of Western Digital Special Edition drives).
My primary system disk is actually two WD Raptors in RAID 0 that have been fantastic. My main storage disks are two Maxtor 16MB cache 300GB SATA drives in RAID 0. None of these disks has had any problems (knock on wood).
Maybe it’s time for one of those new-fangled networkable hard drive dealies.
Followup: The disk isn't actually losing any data. Scandisk finds nothing wrong with it. It simply has a habit of “falling asleep“ and not waking up again properly. I can reactivate it in Disk Manager after it does this and it works fine (for a while). I'm still planning to remove it from my system... but at least no data was corrupted.