So why after years of harddrives not failing on me and not having data issues, this has been the bad year of harddrives. I had one failed drive [severe head crash] and tried some home-brew fixes [i.e. freeze the drive, let it spin up and go at it again]. After that failure, I tried to see what it would cost for data recovery. And than the kicker was that it would be about $2500 to restore “some” of the data. So I said to hell with that and had to download everything again.

Now the more recent problem was with a corrupt MFT and with that I had more troubles, thinking it was an enclosure issue [which I had to RMA 2 of them, now I might have to RMA another one…] and than finally figuring out it was actually the disk. I’ve managed to get it all back using some geeky tools [TestDisk, getDataBack NTFS]. Sigh….what a year…