I’ve had some bad luck with external hard drives. For a while I was using a 100gb as my primary photo drive. Well, it died. Fortunately I was able to take it apart and plug the drive into an EIDE controller and keep the data. It was backed up on DVD, but getting it off the drive was much faster and easier.
Next I bought a 250gb Western Digital MyBook to use as a backup drive. After about a month it started clicking which was indicative of a hard drive failure. Back to WD it went under warranty and they sent me a new one. To their credit their customer service was very good about replacing the drive. About a week ago my backup routine started sending me emails that it couldn’t find the drive. So this morning I took it apart to see if the drive was still good (it was). So it’s still going to be a backup drive, but moved to my Linux server where I can keep a little more airflow on it and hopefully not have the issues.
But since it was such a pain to take apart I figured someone out there might like to see the steps.
This is the drive the way it looks laying over on its side ready to get taken apart. There are a lot of different MyBooks and I wasn’t able to easily find instructions on how to take apart this particular model.
