Hard Drive Crash: Now and Then

Posted by Rick Hosmer on January 18 2011

Yesterday I was working through our Monday morning production meeting, giving project updates, setting schedules and making sure the week's work was getting handled. About halfway through the meeting, the hard drive on my MacBook Pro decided it didn't want to run any more.

I immediately flashed back to what it was like 20 years ago when one of our computers would lose a hard drive. Major catastrophe. We would have to order a hard drive to ship from Apple in Cupertino, CA. That would take several days and cost well over a thousand dollars. Then we'd have to pay a technician to install the hard drive. Then came days of work reloading the replacement drive with software and working files that had to be transferred from dozens of Zip disks or CDs. It was impossible to accomplish any real work while this was happening. Days of productivity lost and thousands of dollars spent all to replace a failed 80MB drive.

So jump back to yesterday. My hard drive dies at about 10AM. After the production meeting, I go to Office Depot, spend $80 for a 500 GB hard drive (over 6,000 times the capacity of an old 80 MB drive), and Micah installs it in my MacBook Pro in about 5 minutes. After that, I transfer my software and files from the palm-sized 500 GB back-up drive that sits on my desk and rebuild my email database. In around 3 hours and at a fraction of the cost of replacing a hard drive in 1990, I am back in business... with a drive that is magnitudes better than anything available then.

At Klündt | Hosmer, we live and die by technology. But it's nice that technical "catastrophes" of the past can be handled so painlessly, today.