Getting my goat, grinding my gears...

I'm in an okay mood, but two things are irritating me this evening.

Freecycle.
Seagate.

Freecycle because despite the fact that it seemed to be working, has actually not worked.
Seagate because despite the fact that it seems to be working, it's probably going to stop soon.

I have no interest in obtaining other people's offers. There's no space, and I have pretty much what I need. The concept of Freecycle is fine. Why waste something that someone else can use on a landfill site. Fine. I don't even care about the people that technically abuse the good natured nature of the offerings by taking then selling on. All I wanted to do was rid myself of my VHS collection.

My 7200.11 is my second. The first started having problems from day one, and it was replaced. I had a choice to take a refund and shop elsewhere but chose not to. Today, the web reports that these drives are failing in large numbers. Rumour has it new drives are fixed before shipping, but no firmware upgrade exists, though it's widely believed a firmware issue, and by no means a new one, which happens at boot up and renders the disk intact but undetectable, useful only to expensive data recovery services.

I offer my VHS collection, about 20 tapes of Simpsons, Red Dwarf - stuff people like to watch. Three people respond very quickly. I offer them to the first person, but receive no response back. I offer it to the second and again, no response. The third responds, but has failed to show up to collect them at the agreed time.

The drive doesn't contain much of personal value. It was supposed to be a place to store music, TV and backup important files away from my main almost full drive. That unfortunately means that it was supposed to be the drive that I would rely on not to fail if the other one did. The music is mirrored elsewhere, but the video files are far too large. Now I can lose them in one fell swoop. The only thing I can really do is buy yet another drive to back this one up.

I take too long over emailing. I must get messages just right. This means my time spent sorting out freecycle is in excess of an hour. This is time that could have been better spent. I'm baffled as to why three people eagerly respond to tell me they want what i'm offering, then don't follow through. I think there must be a psychological barrier for some with this service. If it's of no value to me, then they're doing me the favour. At very least, the whole transaction can be very casual. I should be lucky that I don't have to drive to the recycling centre.

Freecycle is a glorified collection of Yahoo! groups. Another internet forum. If three of it's members are anything to go by, not exempt from everything that is wrong with Internet forums. Little else to say on that.

Seagate is one of the two biggest names in storage. It has failed to respond to this mass failure entirely so far. The damage is done. If next week I get a firmware upgrade I will still never go near them again. Mean time between failures is fine for statistical analysis but when you sell millions of time bombs disguised as ways to store data, the very second you fix it (again, it is rumoured to be fixed on newly shipped drives), fix it for everyone! Many hundreds of thousands of potential explosions are on drives in the hands of people perfectly capable of flashing firmware. Waiting just guarantees a continued stream of customers circling then ditching into the plug hole until the day the fix comes in, and that's customers that are affected already AND customers that are lucky enough not to experience the problem. I am now going to limit switching on my server machine because statistically speaking, the fewer times I turn this on until I figure out what to do, the less likely I am to suddenly be confronted with a missing drive and that sickening feeling that even though I knew this was going to happen, I somehow haven't fully protected myself against it. On the other hand, it's on now, so the hardcore types would tell me I shouldn't switch it off again. At the moment it's 100% in my hands. Problem is, I have nowhere to move the data to, unless you want me to burn 30 DVD's, half of which will likely fail to restore later.

Let's hear it once for eBay and Western Digital!