RIP, Western Digital WD1200.  Blogging has been light because my home hard drive decided to go kaput on me on Tuesday night.  I had it replaced today, but finished installing new software, etc. late, so there will not be time for too much blogging. 

But just enough to point out a few things.  First of all, the fact that probability is really no more than a religion: either you choose to believe in it or not.  For a low-event probability (e.g. 1 in 1000), for 999 people out of 1,000, the probability is zero and for 1, the probability is 1.  So what does 0.001 really mean?  Similarly, what does an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) rating really mean?  Well, if you choose to believe it, it means that if there are 8,760 hours in a year (365 days by 24 hours per day), and if we have a HD with an MTBF of 50,000, that means that on average, that HD should run for 5.71 years without any failure.  Not bad, except that just like any other statistic or probability, there is an element of "religion" here, as this figure (5.71 years) represents both an average and an estimate.  There is always the risk of odd statistical aberration or other anomalies that are smoothed out by statistical averages. 

Moreover, sometimes, environmental factors can play a role as well, and elements such as heat and power can definitely have an impact.  What about the PC configuration?  Ever heard of a Microsoft Office utility called Findfast?  As written in this PCWorld entry:

" Findfast occasionally indexes every Office document on your hard drive. It's supposed to work only in idle time, but what it thinks of as idle time (when the hard disk isn't working) usually doesn't jibe with how you see idle time (when you're not using the PC at all). You can't help but notice Findfast doing its job: Suddenly your hard drive starts spinning wildly when you're just typing or reading."

Funny enough, my HD went when I was using Microsoft's defrag utility, although that might have been just a coincidence.  But I have turned off Findfast on my new Seagate HD.  However, I am still choosing a new backup source as well.  Maybe Om Malik or Tom Hardware's Guide can come to the rescue, but in the meantime I am open to suggestions.

Update (21/05): A TF reader e-mailed me that Findfast was discontinued after Office2000, having been replaced by the Microsoft Windows Indexing service.