My WD1600AAJS - Dying!

After almost 11 months, my 160GB Western Digital SATA II Drive is failing. At first I thought it was just some bad sectors.. well I checked and scanned and used Data Lifeguard from Western Digital.. there were no bad sectors. It was the controller board inside the disk that was malfunctioning due to overheating even though I have three fans in the ATX Casing with one exclusively for the disk. Now, it would fail to read/write once in a while.. or after a few minutes or so, and I have to shut down the PC and turn it ON after a few minutes of rest to make it work as it was 10 months ago. Guess these drives weren't meant to last especially if your PC is "ON" forever with occasional rests every month or so for a few hours.. because I am hosting my own web and email server on it.

All my data and games I wiped clean from the drive because I wanted to format it at low level using Data Lifeguard's "Write Zeroes". Well since it is not caused by bad sectors, there was no hope of reviving it back like a new disk. A month ago I've been experiencing symptoms of Delayed Write Failures (DWF) on Windows XP. And accessing of the disk is very slow. The good news is, I can send this back to WD Services since it is still on warranty till 2010 and have it replaced. The bad news is that this is my only disk and I cannot afford to buy another one while I wait for the replacement which would take about a month and I cannot live without my PC for a day.

Perhaps when I could get a new disk I would send this back for replacement, but for now I am using a ramdisk with 1GB out of my 3GB memory so I can at least browse the net or play low-end small installation games. I am also using firefox portable on my 1.9GB usb drive to browse the net so only windows accesses the hard disk to prevent damaging it some more. My other applications on the ramdisk and usb drives runs very smoothly since it is not using the "slowed-down" disk. Maybe I should consider Seagate Drives next time.

Games stopped: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SHOC
Application data lost: My 3D Models/Projects and Programming Projects
Low-end games played: Starwars KOTOR, KOTOR2, Outcast, Jedi Academy since they do not access the disk most of the time (only when loading/saving which could fail in my damaged drive sometimes).

I would probably lay low from the Internet for now..