Hell Is External Devices


So I bought a new external HD the other day. My old one was getting pretty full, as well as just getting old, so it was more or less time to make the switch. I picked up a new drive, a Lacie Network Space ethernet thingie designed by Neil Poulton (who sounds like he’s probably friends with Jony Ive) with 1 TB of memory, which equals a lot of filth, and was just about to clone the old drive. It was at this exact time that said old drive decided to give up the ghost. Having backed up my machine the prior evening, this was both unexpected and disconcerting, to say the least. My entire music library, for example, all 65GB of it, was stored externally. As was a bunch of movies. (Luckily, they were all public domain movies I found at Google Video, so it’s not a huge disaster, and besides: early Roger Corman flicks rarely warrant a second viewing…but it’s the damn principle of it!) I tried plugging it in one more time. My desktop on my Macbook remained unsullied by HD icons. Goddamnit!

OK, then: Since it wouldn’t play nice with Apple, how about an orange? I hooked up my Acer Aspire One, which is brand new and should have no syncing problems. XP made the weird, soggy hi-hat sound it makes when you connect an external device and I thought “Eureka”, but alas. It remained invisible all the while. Someone pointed out today that it may need a driver. A driver? Why, where’s it going? Oh, right, software. As a Mac user, you tend to take a lot of things for granted. I know my IT friends think Macs are shit for being walled gardens, but speaking as a moron with no mind for customizing who likes things to work out of the box, I applaud their efforts. Not that that helped me. The drive was gone, lost, adrift on a sea of gigabytes, gigaflops, lost socks and what-have-you. I restarted. I unplugged. Restarted again, plugged back in, unplugged, cursed and bellowed, switched ports from Firewire to USB and back in less than 80 days. Every once in a while, the journaling partition became visible, but not the media drive part. Fuck! Shit! Why the hell did I partition the drive in the first place? What possible use did it serve? To taunt me in my time of need? Cocksucker! And thus did time verily fly, as it is wont to do in times of fun.

I went through many emotions during the course of the evening. When I decided to review them, a familiar list took form:

  • Shock or Disbelief (What the fuck?)
  • Denial (No. Fucking. Way.)
  • Bargaining (Oh, fucking come on, willya?)
  • Guilt (Fuck. Why didn’t I take better care of my po…, I mean, art?)
  • Anger (FUCK!)
  • Depression (Oh, fuck…)
  • Acceptance and Hope (Fuck it!)

So I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that my internal HD hasn’t crapped out on me by the time I get home. I’m picking up a new external HD to be on the safe side. Once my ass is backed up, I’m going to make a few last attempt to salvage the old one. This really riles me, but perhaps it’s for the best, and I suppose you should be philosophical about these matters. After all, you need to purge once in a while, so maybe this is it. If I can’t get my music off it, it’ll be annoying, but I can always burn my CDs again. Furthermore, I think have Senuti lying around in some folder, so I should be able to retrieve it off my iPod, so it’s not all a disaster. My most recent projects are still on my laptop, as are my photos (and Christ am I glad I didn’t figure out how to put my iPhoto library on my external drive!) and documents. So it’s not like I lost a lifetime of work, but when all is said and done … well, you know … fuck!