why i hate hard drives - A Sob Story.

Let me tell you a little story.

We're gonna start by going back.

Way back.

Back to a time when I was young and innocent.

Way back to fall semester of sophomore year.

In FILM 260, we were informed that we were required to have external hard drives for the class. For those who don't know, external hard drives are hard drives that can be formatted to either Windows or Apple and are used for storage of large files (like raw digital video for a film) that just won't fit onto an internal hard drive.



I bought the recommended drive, a LaCie 250 GB bad boy for $300 or so. And I shot my first film. And then, although the editing was all in the camera for the assignment, I decided just for grins to go into the 260 lab and edit it a bit. I put together a nice little first-ever-editing-attempt of Cram starring Austin Cottle.

And then the computer crashed before I could save it. And this brought the hard drive down. Other computers didn't even acknowledge its presence when it was plugged in. The Apple specialist in the SFTV (School of Film & Television) didn't know what to do with it.

So I did my second and third 260s all in one sitting on the hard drives of the computers in the lab.

Then, during my internship last summer at Loyola Productions, I met Tangier. He was IT at LP, and the man knew everything there is to know about Apple computers. He discovered, by taking apart my busted up hard drive that the only thing wrong with it was the bridge through which the hard drive is connected to the Firewire cord.

He, however, attempted to walk me through the process of removing the innards myself, and I, in my non-surgical clumsiness broke a couple of small pieces off of said innards. So simultaneously, I voided the warranty on my hard drive and permanently disabled it.



I had no recourse, therefore, for my 360, but to buy a new hard drive. Tangier recommended a brand called Seagate. So I bought a $200 300 GB Seagate hard drive. I flew it to Germany in my luggage.

And I plugged it into a computer. And once again, the hard drive crashed. And I haven't been able to get it to work since then. Jordan, however, had 3 hard drives, one of which he generously loaned me for the semester. These are what I like to refer to as the Salad Days.



However, today, the Salad Days came to a conclusion. When I attempted to upload the footage from Monday's interview (with 96-year old Holocaust survivor Maria Wachter), I discovered that the new hard drive has run out of space. So I cleared like half the stuff on the drive off of it. And it decided to pretend not to notice and continue to claim there is not enough space.

So finally, I have attempted to transfer my project to the office hard drive to upload the last interview and finish the project. But every time I get halfway through the 2 hour transfer I get a strange, indecipherable error message.



So here I am, unable to edit my documentary for which a rough cut is due in T minus 1 day. And I'm a little less than thrilled. And I appreciate you sticking with me through my attempt to solve my problems via blog complaining.

Keep it funky fresh, Junior Woodchucks.