Last night, I found Meteor dead with a blue screen. I tried to reboot it, but about half-way through, the same thing happened. So I powered it down again, and I heard some pretty strange noises that I’ve never heard before coming from the drive cage.
I never thought that a Western Digital Raptor would fail me, at least not that one. The Raptor in Colossus is the original model, it’s older, it has been running for much longer, and I thought that one would be the first to go if any. But no, the Raptor in Meteor failed instead. So the Raptor WD740ADFD has gone to extinction just like all other dinosaurs 
I ran the WD diagnostic program, and not surprisingly, it failed all tests. Here are the details:
Extended test failed
Error / Status code: 0226
226 Sector Relocation Error Failure to relocate a sector during drive repair. The drive has to be replaced.
It was one bad sector that cannot be recovered caused all this. Luckily, I was able to use the WD Edition of Acronis True Image to clone the drive to a spare 250GB drive that I had recently installed in the machine because the Intel Matrix RAID kept dropping the drives “failed” from the mirror (that’s another story).
True Image is a nice program, and very useful. Even though it obviously could not copy the bad sector in question, it got everything else from the drive. After that, I just had to use the Windows XP CD to repair the replacement drive’s XP installation. I didn’t even have to do the entire reinstall process, it repaired some drive errors at the beginning, and then it was fine.
Now I’m not happy about the failure, but as has been my experience with Western Digital hard drives, I almost always am able to recover even when a boot drive fails by cloning it to a replacement drive. So I will stay with them, although I’m now going to experiment with solid state drives. Western Digital makes those too, but they don’t sell them to consumers yet. I guess that’s not surprising, SSDs might cut their traditional hard drive sales.
I ordered a 30GB OCZ Agility SSD just to try those out. They’re starting to become affordable now, and despite their size, they make good boot drives. Should be interesting…