Having only recently recovered from the horror visited upon me by the realisation that my backup (and archive) external USB drive had bitten the dust, I thought that I might share this epic tale of fear, angst and tension with you.

I realise that computer hardware, especially hard drives with moving parts, do not last forever. I also realise that there are many people in the world whose sole goal in life is to separate you from your belongings, especially expensive belongings like laptops. I’ve had lots of personal experience with both of these situations.

Being a pragmatic geek, I have an external USB drive where I regularly save copies of all my most important digital assets, documents, photo’s, video’s, all sorts. The drive started out as a backup drive (which means it contained backup copies of files, a second copy, in other words) but unfortunately, in a spectacular lapse of judgement, shortly thereafter it turned into an ‘archive’ drive, which means it ended up containing the only copy of many important files.

Fast forward a year and go for several months of not plugging-in the backup drive.

One sunny summer day, not very long ago, my wife decided that she needed to retrieve some ‘archived’ designs from the backup drive. Out from its safe and secure hiding place in the drawer it comes and into the laptop it is plugged.

It is hard to convey in words the true extent of the horror was that followed.

Instead of the satisfying whine of the drive spinning up to maximum RPM it… chirped. I kid you not. The hard drive chirped. Ok, it was somewhere between a chirp and a beeping sound. The actual sound is irrelevant really because, as anybody who has been in this situation before can tell you, when a hard drive makes any sound other than the high-pitched whine, very, bad, things, have, happened.

Staring in disbelief at the chirping hard drive, my mind refused to accept the inevitable. I tried a different USB port. Two USB ports, THREE USB ports. A different laptop, a different USB cable. I even tried putting it back in the drawer for a couple of days.

It was all for naught. The drive was chirping it’s swan song, its final squeaks before the inevitable, permanent silence…

…but I didn’t have the money for data recovery, so failure was not yet an option!

“The external USB casing!”, my fear laden mind screamed.

“THAT must be the problem!”

“Fair enough”, I thought, “the USB casing could be broken, stranger things have happened.”

So, I sent my wife on a black ops mission of critical importance, out into the wild world of PC hardware, equipped with nothing but a credit card and her survival skills. She is a highly trained and dangerous shopper but the computer shop was new territory. I gave her all the training I could manage on a Wednesday evening, creating a mission plan, setting the objectives for the engagement the following day.

“Buy a new USB casing my love”, I said during our intense briefing session at the command HQ.

“I’m sure it’s the casing that’s busted, getting a new casing is sure to resolve our problems, you MUST find us a new casing!”, I muttered in a conspiratorial manner.

“Yes dear”, she said while rolling her eyes.

I was able to sleep that night, secure in the knowledge that all would be well, if only we could appropriate a new USB casing.

The following day, my wife, employing all her shopping skills, finely honed through years of repeated and bloody engagements in theatres of shopping around the world, managed to acquire the replacement hardware. The mission was a success and civilian casualties were kept to a minimum.

Upon arriving at home, she took it upon herself to place the old chirping hard drive into the new casing, desperate (and terribly impatient) to find that all was well and the problem had been resolved. Determined to forge ahead alone in this struggle, she unpacked the newly acquired device.

Having little knowledge of such arcane things, she briefly consulted a friendly geek online, in an IRC channel called #geekzone (where else?), to establish what the ‘antenna’ that came with the casing was for and where it should go.

The ‘antenna’, the geek said, was a ‘screwdriver’. Her Hardware-Fu is not strong.

Struggling valiantly through a technical minefield of screwdrivers, hard drives and aluminium casings, she finally managed to force the drive into the box. She plugged it in, but alas, the drive was still chirping, taunting…

I could hear the heart wrenching cry of horror from my office, 35km away. Almost. I would have a look at it when I got home, I assured her via a text message.

Upon arriving at home, I desperately considered the situation. I examined the new casing, the wires that came with it, the connection to the hard drive. I searched on-line for a solution, my mind racing, my fingers desperately stabbing at the keyboard.

“There is one last thing to try”, my fevered mind hurled to the fore.

“Plug the USB cable AND the power cable in”, blurted my brain.

Now, you might wonder why this wasn’t tried earlier. I believe the answer is ‘flawed logic’ based on ‘incomplete knowledge’… or something like that. I’ve never used a power cable on the external USB drive since it draws the power directly from the USB cable, so it never occurred to me to try that.

I plugged two USB cables into my laptop; the power adapter at the end of one into the hard drive power port and the mini USB adapter on the other into the broken-until-right-now hard drive, hands trembling, brow sweaty…

The drive managed to spin up.

The moment of confusion dulled my elation at the positive result somewhat so to help you avoid similar conflicting emotions, let me explain the conclusion I have drawn. Based on my very limited knowledge of hardware, I would take my conclusion with a pinch of salt though… you’ve been warned.

What I think happened is this: The hard drive usually draws power from the USB which it uses to run. It takes a certain amount of power to spin the disk from stand still to optimum RPM. The problem is that the disk it’s self has parts that cause friction and I think that over time as the drive gets older, the amount of friction increases as the bearings wear down. Eventually, the disk requires a miniscule amount of power more than the USB connection delivers and is unable to spin up and the chirping (or beeping) you hear, is the drive failing to do so.

Adding just a minute amount of extra power seems to push it just over the edge, making it able to spin up.

And so, the happy conclusion to my story is: If your external USB hard drive is chirping or beeping at you and you think it’s busted, try plugging in the extra, generally un-used power cable, it might just save your data (and your heart and nerves). You should also consider that when a drive has reached this point, it’s probably mere moments away from really being dead.

I have since made a copy of my ‘backup’ drive and have committed to procuring a NAS with RAID which I will hide somewhere to do my actual backing up. I also now use Dropbox for everything critical anyway relying on the ‘cloud’ and several computers to keep my prized files from the dark abyss of non-existence.

With backups, more is better I think.