Life is filled with stress and many of life’s most stressful moments are a result of the loss of loved ones – the loss of a spouse, the loss of a parent, the loss of a child, the loss of a friend…or the loss of an external hard drive. And I’m not talking just any external hard drive. Special Agent Seagate, my trusty external of six years, blew on Monday evening after sustaining a mild surge. I don’t think I have been this beside myself in months and have been Charlie Brown moping for days now.
Special Agent Seagate was so special because he stored all of my music (upwards of 45,000 songs), all of my photographs (from the summer after high school to date), all of my edited creative writing (failed poetry, unfinished short stories and half-chapters) and about a ten megabyte piece of my heart. There may have been some porn on there too. That one small piece of hardware had recorded my life for the past SIX years, let alone the fact that my dead HD from my old desktop was ghosted onto him in 2007. And all of it – is gone.
Each time I saved an album review or uploaded a photograph Special Agent would shine his orange strip brightly in my direction as if to say, “It is an absolute pleasure to store your files.” Every song to every album was organized neatly in lettered folders. Each silly video made with friends in college waiting to be viewed on nights when I felt like reminiscing. Horrible poems were available with a few clicks of the mouse so that I could recite them to myself until I had sufficiently embarrassed myself. Every incriminating picture of yours truly stowed deeply in some purposely misnamed sub-folder.
Special Agent Seagate and I spent every day together. We’d even travel occasionally. This past weekend he and I spent at Lake George toiling away over the review of Animal Collective’s Centipede Hz. “Queue up the first track again, Special Agent,” I’d say and in seconds I would be revisiting the album. Now my iTunes is a sea of !s.
I thought we would be together forever (hence not buying a second external like a total fucking idiot) and so it came as a shock (quite literally) when Special Agent passed earlier this week. He is certainly missed and cannot be replaced. What I am hoping for is a successful data extraction. SAS is currently en route to my sister via USPS in NYC where her technologically gifted friend Ed will attempt to defile my lost friend and ghost the data onto another hard drive. I think of it less as an autopsy and more a possible reincarnation. Special Agent Seagate is a hollow man now but his spirit, and more importantly my life, will hopefully be lifted and carefully deposited onto another device.
Please send your hopes and prayers my way as I am in mourning. And yes, regardless of project: data extraction, I will be buying two externals so that this never happens again.
the self-hating hipster 
hooooooooly shit. my deepest sympathies.
not sure if you got project: data extraction completed, but I had the exact same drive and was able to recover. it was a bitch of time getting the case off, but once I hooked it to an external sata power supply/adapter all was right with the world.
this helped, too: http://thydzik.com/how-to-disassemble-a-seagate-freeagent-pro/
Thanks, dude! I was lucky enough to get everything restored and now I have a 2TB Buffalo that performs auto-backups.