May I recommend once and for all not to use Maxtor drives? Yes, they carry a terrible reputation, and yes, it’s totally my fault for using them in the first place, even despite my own better judgment, but this is the second (and possibly third) Maxtor to fail me in only a few months. My RAID-5 server at home that does a lot of grunt work in the background (my primary workstation is a Vaio FS); this afternoon it had one its three Maxline Plus IIs fail. No big, I thought — being a Maxtor array, I keep a replacement handy, just in case. Pop the top, swap out the bad for the good, turn the machine back on to rebuild the array… and a second drive fails. For those not in the know about RAID-5, that means bye-bye array, no more data. So I let everything cool down, turn back on and hit the embedded array manager, and I think that first drive may yet come back — but that second drive is definitely toast. Moral of the story: I’m still convinced RAID-5 is a perfectly fine backup-free way to living for most home users, so long as you’re not using Maxtor drives.

Heed my warning. This isn’t the first time, and I doubt it’ll be the last — unless I lost everything, and chuck these things out the window.

Update, 11:16PM: All hail! While installing XP to an old external drive in order to get the system up and running to do a RAID rebuild on the remains of my array, the drive has write failures. Installed again to another drive — worked fine, but it locks during a boot (presumably while initializing the rebuild for the first time) and knocks out my data partition. Then my spare (4th) RAID drive totally dies during the rebuild. I’m left with my original two, which are somehow still magically operating in degraded mode; after a chkdsk it looks like I lose a few hundred files, but gain access to the data partition again. I high-tail it over to Best Buy to get a drive big enough to back this stuff up, but despite their claiming to be open until 11:00PM, they closed at 10:00PM. The man at the door took no pity upon my plight, and sent me back to Brooklyn.

Update, 11/29 7:03PM: In the process of data recovery, somehow got two remaining from the four in degraded mode, though it’s very sketch. We’ll see how much I lose. Yay.

P.S. Did I mention today was my first day as an AOL employee? No?