Computer problems and God

Two nights ago I sat down at my computer and began to surf and post.  Suddenly my mouse died, then something else began to act oddly, then... well... nothing.

I quickly got out the Mac OS X boot disk and booted into it, fired up Disk Utility only to discover that my UsersHD (my external hard drive onto which I moved my /Users path) had completely died.  DU could not even see it.

So, at 10:30 PM I dashed out to WalMart and picked up another MyBook.  I already have a MyBook that I use as my Time Machine drive and it seems to work well enough (albeit loudly).  Got home, went to plug in my new USB (no more firewire I guess, at least for the moment) and I BROKE THE USB HUB CONNECTOR!  Somehow broke the solder points.

At this point I am wondering if I had offended God more deeply than usual.  So I got out my old USB 1.0 hub, hooked up the disks and began the restore.  I waited patiently as the restore began and noticed the time to completion estimate:  68 hours.  I let it run overnight and it had gotten almost nowhere.  At this point I scrapped the restore, unplugged the hub and plugged both drives directly into the iMac and did the restore (which went quickly) and while the restore was going  I zipped over to Radio Shack and picked up another USB 2.0 hub.

At the moment, all is well.  I have given thanks to God for Time Machine, backups and the fact that I was able to restore everything just as it was.  Still, hard drive performance is not fantastic.  I take heart in knowing that Applications, Swap and other functions (logging, etc.) take place on the iMac internal SATA 2 drive, while only /User data files exist on the USB drive.  The performance hit is not TOO noticeable.

I am now considering picking up a new miniStack 3.0 (Firewire 800/eSata) which would speed up data transfers considerably... but I guess I really cannot justify it, so I probably won't bother doing that and I will settle with the grinding MyBook concierto that goes on all the time I am at my computer (it is amusing when Time Machine kicks in and both drives start grinding away).

Finally, the one thing about this that irritates me MOST is that the drive that died was barely 3 months old.  I have never had a drive die on my before, this was my first and the fact that it is so new was rather disappointing.  If the MyBooks last a solid year I will be pleased I think.  Anyway, enough of that.  Hope everyone has a wonderful week!