Yeas, that disk was *only* 4 years old… it was into that computer which I bought in 2001, where originally there were two identical disks of 20Gig (the other one had already died last year with exactly the same kind of mechanical noises, so I was prepared to that in a way…). So tuesday night I had to do disaster recovery and replace it (luckily I had a spare one, if somewhat smaller), which means I missed several hours of sleep in the process.

Being a firewall did not have much data on it, so I did not loose important data, just had to set it up again and reconfigure a couple of things.

Anyhow, this makes me think how crap this home PC's hardware often is, anyway. It mainly happens that they overheat, no matter how many fans I stuffed in the case, and generally speaking are not made to stay on 24/7 as I would like them to do. Being home PC hardware they just somehow *assume* you will make them rest sometimes, which I absolutely don't. Yeah, I know the theory, I should have server class machines o do the server's task, you're right. If you feel generous, send me one, as I can't afford it.
Well, wait: I *did* have a server class machine once upon a time.
It was fantastic - they were WASTING that at my old job, and I did take it over, for the amazing price of TEN (10) EUROs:
A double processor PII266 with 256MB RAM, 6 SCSI disks, RAID controller, DAT/24 backup device…. I loved it, and it has been serving muscetta.com and my other domains for a couple of years when I was in Holland.

Then, when I moved back to Italy I had to face the follwing things:
1) there was no ADSL in the place where I was going to live, so I could not anymore host my own site at home (which I enjoyed greatly) anyway;
2) I could not relocate such a big thing, as I had enough of *newer* and *faster* computers, and it wouldn't have fit in the truck we rented for the relocation… let's say I gave precedence to the useful (and nearly as big) dish-washer.

So I moved my domains to a hosting company, and detached from the server that was working so well.
Now I am back to stupid cheap IDE drives that break when you less expect it. Which sucks.