Offline for one day
I will be offline for one day, either Thursday or Friday, as I plan on performing the yearly upgrade and migration of one of my three hard drives. This is a policy that I began many years ago, not because the drives were beginning to fail, but because my need for hard drive space increased so much. As it happens, this policy is a good idea anyway, because hard drives do fail eventually, and I put a great deal of stress on them, and on my computer.
This computer is up and operating for an almost constant 24-hour cycle. I can’t remember the last time I turned it off at night, but I know it must not be more than a dozen times since the start of the year.
I call this policy drive rotation. This year I will rotate out Drive E:, which was initially formatted June 15th, 2005. I have the replacement on order, and it should arrive Thursday afternoon. If it arrives early enough, I will begin the replacement immediately. If not, it will occur Friday morning.
After the rotation, my system configuration will look like this:
Drive C: 200 GB (split into two partitions)
Drive D: 500 GB
Drive E: 500 GB
This means that I will have a terabyte+ of HDD space on my system! Fantastic! I’m also planning on moving D to E temporarily and re-formatting it. I’ve had some misgivings about D for a while, as some operations I did on it last year ended up in failure.
For this reason, I will likely be offline for at least 12-hours, perhaps more.