Trivial Matters

Grrr…

I bought a hard drive several months ago in preparation for my deployment. I wanted to increase my music library in the likely event that I was asked to play some music while I was over there, and my MacBook HD just was not big enough to hold it all. (My current iTunes library is about 10 GB larger than the MacBook’s HD.)

So I got a Smart Disk FireLite 250 GB drive with FireWire connection. I got everything moved over and started importing more songs, TV shows, and movies. Pretty soon I was on my way to complete domination of the music scene (ok… maybe not). The drive worked so well that I started using it as my backup for the MacBook itself.

Then, a few weeks ago, the drive suddenly went offline. I checked the MacBook, and the FireWire port works fine. After a while, I plugged the drive back in and it stayed connected for a while, and then fell offline again. Thinking it may be a power problem, I tried to get a power adapter for it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any specifications on the type of power to supply beyond 8-33 VDC (there was no amperage rating), so I got an adjustible power adapter from Radio Shack: 1 A, 13.5-30 VDC.

That worked for a few hours and then it fell offline again (after I trasferred all of my new music from the MacBook to the drive). Now it won’t connect at all, so I got a new external drive (a 400 GB USB Western Digital Passport HD) and am in the process of manually copying the library off of my iPod to the new drive, after which I have to go through the library in iTunes and remove all of the old file references.

That means that I will also lose my play counts, but I think that’s for the better as it gives the new tracks a chance to catch up in my Top 50.

I’ll probably take the drive apart at some point and use a new case to see if I can recover anything I might be missing, and maybe use it again as a backup drive.

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