The story of three hard drive failures in a row... and of going back to the well

I’d also like to remind folks to keep backups. See, I’m in the midst of data hell and I only lost one night of sleep over it.

I have 2 drives that store my photos. P and Q. P was the first photo drive, a 300 gig Western Digital. Q is the other photo drive, a newer 500 gig Seagate that I got when P was full.

Now, I had purchased two drives… a 300 and a 500 gig, both from Western Digital. And so I started out rebuilding another machine and I discovered that the 300 gig drive failed a day or so after I had gotten it working. So I had to start over with that machine with a replacement drive. Then a few days ago, the SMART warning on P went off. This is where I freaked out, even though I’ve got backups. Because I don’t want to have to rely on them, see? So I try to grab a copy of everything from P over onto Q (Since Q’s not that full at the moment). And I had my wife do it after a bit because I needed to go to work the next day.

Now I take the 500 gig Western Digital I purchased and try to get that drive working again. Except now it doesn’t even get past the formatting stage before it throws up SMART errors and stops working.

So now I have three failed drives. I’m thinking somebody manhandled my drives on the way to me or Western Digital had a very very bad day. Not sure. Either way, I’m not happy about P dying after only 1.5 months. Either way, this is a lot easier to deal with given that I’ve got backups of just about everything. Plus, a lot of stuff’s on film, so I can just re-scan the film. But I am going to Central Computer tomorrow to pick up some Seagate drives just to be safe. Don’t want to mess around, no?

I kinda reached a point a bit ago where I realized that I’d forgotten about some of the stuff I wanted to accomplish. I had spent too much time doing normal shooting and not enough time doing crazy lighting. And I wasn’t using my light toys.

I realized that part of this was a programming problem. See, I discovered that the sort of logic that I wanted to program in was just getting too obnoxious when written in assembler language. So I sat down and rewrote the firmware in C one day. I had targeted it for the scheduled session with one particular model, who turned out to be a drama-queen flake… so it was not until a bit later that I actually got a chance to use it.

I also wanted to take a break from working with models for a bit to make sure that I could approach things from a fresh perspective. I took a break from scenery and spent enough time looking through my old pics to realize that I wasn’t concentrating nearly enough on composition and that I needed to slow down some.

I also realized that how I was approaching lightpaintings needed to change. I took some really great outdoor lightpaintings, but I wanted to get back to where I used a darkened room with no backdrop so that you’d really be able to appreciate the presence of a model. I’ve changed some techniques. I used to light-paint for all light in the scene, now I’m using my strobist lighting to generate the base and then add more light with the light toys.

It looks like I can get one or maybe two shoots with one set of color patterns before I need to make a new set of patterns. It seems to work best to program in a pattern before a set of sessions and just expend the possibilities of that pattern instead of trying to set up a whole list of patterns to cycle through. That makes the software simpler and means that I can have everything well understood beforehand. I’m only scratching the surface of what I can do with these boards. The first generation was just some simple triangle-waves. Now I’m going to have multi-step repeating sequences.