Powerbook Hard Drive Failure

Turns out that yesterdays rant about memory bloat was misdirected. While memory bloat with Firefox and Safari is a really annoying issue and should be fixed by the respective development teams, the reason it was causing me so much trouble is that the hard drive in my Powerbook is dying. My machine has one of the Toshiba 80GB POS put in Powerbooks. MacTouch has documented how lousy Toshiba laptop drives are.

While it's true that disks can fail at any time, most of the disk failures I've had are all from models that had a massively elevated number of failures. Last drive failure I've had on a home machine was from an IBM Deskstar which was such a POS that IBM settled a class action suit over the Deskstars.

My backups of important stuff are pretty recent and I'm in the process of copying everything off the drive. It's going really slowly as I'm about 10 hours into the process and I've only got 19GB. SMART reporter still shows the drive as green so perhaps its got enough life left it to complete the remaining 40 GB on the drive.

Considering that Apple products are priced as premium products, using crap for hard drives is really irrating. Lying about it is even worse (see MacInTocuh link above). If used Windows machines, I'd certainly switch vendors on the next purchase.