I think my Mac Mini got jealous of all the attention my car received recently. While I was relaxing Thursday night, I heard a distinct “ka-ching” sound coming from it. The discomforting noise was audible all the way from 10 feet. Fearing the 250 GB drive I bought last Summer was on the verge of failure, I powered the Mini down (why the site was down for most of Friday) so I could take it to work where backing up is easier; I can watch it between calls/tasks. The input-output errors during the imaging process wasn’t very re-assuring but hey, the fourth time is the charm. Actually, I think the difficulty was the destination I was saving into.
The people I bought the drive from are good sports since I have a warranty on it and more importantly, they’re my friends; we’ll all be very civil on assessing what the “ka-ching” could be. I’d be cool anyway. After 10 years of people screaming at me for matters which aren’t my fault with their computers, I’ve learned to be like Kane from Kung Fu, most days, in customer service situations. I would prefer the drive to be perfectly fine for a couple big reasons:
- Backing up in 10.4 Server is a nuisance but 10.5’s Time Machine isn’t guaranteed on my set up either.
- Finding a 2.5″ PATA hard drive over 160 GB in capacity is nearly impossible now that everything made by Apple converted to SATA when the first MacBooks appeared.
So get ready for Picayune to be MIA around Monday (March 30). I’m hoping it won’t be for long, my car has already booked part of my upcoming two days of vacation in the quest to buy it a new wheel.
I did entertain the idea of taking the plunge on purchasing a replacement Intel-based Mini but I think I’d prefer to get another year out of this G4-based Mini. Besides, the improved hardware won’t matter thanks to the bottlenecks caused by all the traffic on the Internet these days, namely America’s inferior broadband infrastructure.