Our house, for some reason, has the flakiest electricity I’ve ever known. That includes two years at university living in a house with perpetually stoned, necessarily lazy housemates whose financial misprudence, procrastination and often downright bloody-mindedness conspired to let the metered electricity, run first into credit, then die completely. These frequent power cuts led mostly to bickering and inconvenience whereas, in my current abode, it is leading to the death of expensive pieces of hardware that has the misfortune to be plugged into this bastard grid.
A couple of months ago we had a series of power cuts in the house. I call them power cuts but their nature was more of brown-outs followed by blackouts followed by full power, maybe another brownout or blackout and then ominous silence from pieces of computer gear, now powered down, not playing music, not humming their hard drives. By the time these power cuts had finished, over a period of a week or more, I’d lost a new half-terabyte firewire drive and my Mathmos bedside light. How a bedside The last power cut we had was at 11 pm on the night of a house party. Our guests were plunged into darkness, the music died and we were left with… shock-horror, nothing to do but chat! The difference with this even was that the power didn’t come back on. Drunken calls were made to the electricity provider who concluded nothing-much-at-all and left to go and fritter some time away ostensibly investigating a local power doohickey down the road. At 3 or 4 am the electricity returned, we don’t know why. That night, candles we’d lit overspilt and rather ruined the rug in the lounge with molten wax. Errantly trodden into the carpet in the hallway as well, I blame this at least in part on the electricity failures.
Just now, the power went again. The first time in a few weeks, and only the second time since the melty-wax evening. My music died, my surviving external hard disk made horrible noises and the laptop told me off for unplugging it. My heart was in my throat and I hoped like hell that it wasn’t about to suffer the same fate. There are 100 gig of my photos on it, all my iTunes. Unbacked up since the drive that died last time was the backup and I don’t have a hundred quid to throw at it just now. (Japan trips don’t come cheap when you have a fetish for buying expensive lenses and electronic toys!)
So, I’ve turned my hard drive off. Too scared to power it up since the electricity is clearly not playing ball. I think the best thing to do is ameliorate the problem in one of two ways: buy a small UPS to smooth out the power losses and spikes or buy a new hard drive to cover backing up the data (which kinda needs doing ANYWAY). If I buy another drive, I could find they BOTH die in the same power-related horror. If I buy a UPS I could find that the sole copy of my data dies in an unrelated disk failure. My gut feeling is to buy a new drive since surely the chances of power spikes knocking them both out is more remote than a single disk failing from non-power-related doom. Who knows.
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