Cracking It Open

 

After my youngest got onto the school bus, I headed down to the office for my morning routine of catching up on blog reading and doing any deskwork needed for my three treasurer positions or bills that have arrived in the mail. I logged onto my computer but was greeted with a warning that my backup service would delete the contents of my hard drive stored on the backup's cloud that I use to store all my computer files in 39 days if nothing was done. 

So I fiddled with that for a few minutes before I finally went into windows explorer and found that it didn't show my hard drive or it's contents at all. As far as my computer was concerned, I only had the hard drive that the operating system runs on and I had no second drive to store data.

What proceeded next was an hour of reboots, using various diagnostic software and prayers to try and get my data hard drive to appear again but all without success. Thirty years ago, I used to consider myself a pretty good computer tech and so I pulled something from the cobwebs of what I would have done back then. I rebooted my computer while pressing the F2 key to access the BIOS menu. I don't pretend to know what BIOS stands for other than it is like the motor of a car. Without it nothing works. 

I got into the BIOS menu and looked around but couldn't even find the menu where my hard drives were located. Knowing an errant key stroke or changed setting in the BIOS meeting could completely junk my computer, I exited and let it boot up to Windows. My hard drive reappeared!

I counted it as a fluke until the next day it happened again and I had to reboot through the BIOS to get it to reappear. I wasn't worried so much about the data because as I said, it is backed up to the cloud automatic but I knew that getting another hard drive into place and downloading all my data back onto it is a process that takes a couple weeks due to the shear amount of data. Not being able to use any computer file or create new ones for that long would be a major crimp in my style.

Long story short(er), I eventually diagnosed the issue to my security cameras outside the house which record video to my data drive continuously 24 hours a day. When I replaced this computer last April, I finally got with the modern world and selected solid state hard drives instead of the antiquated hard drives with spinning platters. The continuous use of the solid state hard drive had caused it to get hot, much like a smart phone does when used continuously, to the point it overheated and shut down for its own safety. I have since turned my security cameras to only record in the event they are triggered and will install an old spinning drive, which as it is turns out, is what the security camera world has recommended for years to stand up to the rigors of continuous writing. I have not had any issues with my hard drive shutting down since and all the diagnostic programs says it is still in good working order with no defects. 

Which at last brings me to the picture at the top of this post of the inside of my computer. I opened it up to look at replacing the "disappearing" data drive at one point and later to verify that I had space to add an old fashioned spinner drive. It took me awhile to figure out what components were actually my two solid state hard drives as they looked nothing like the 3.5" or 5.25" form factor drives of old days. It turns out they are the two rectangular objects with white stickers just to the right of the fan in the center of the photo. After some research, their form factor is referred to PCIe format. I assume the P and C stand for Personal Computer and the lower case e stands for express but I don't know what the I stand for though I could probably google it.

So to wrap things up, I learned that the computer world is nearly out of my grasp of knowledge meaning I'm nearing official old fogey status and will probably have to ask my kids to fix it in the future. My new spinning drive will hopefully arrive next week and I hope I can install it without issue and get my security cameras pointed in it's direction. As for the solid state drive with my data, I'm going to assume it is still in good order. I have read they have a limited number of read/write cycles that can be done on them which with a continuously writing security system can be an issue but with normal data storage, I should never complete a full cycle for the rest of my life or the rest of the computer's life.