{"id":91,"date":"2008-06-06T00:01:50","date_gmt":"2008-06-06T07:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=91"},"modified":"2008-06-05T22:11:33","modified_gmt":"2008-06-06T05:11:33","slug":"mybook-warning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=91","title":{"rendered":"MyBook Warning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those external MyBook drives are hot! And I’m not describing how well they’re selling.
\n
\nI enjoy those external MyBook hard drives, manufactured by Western Digital. I’ve had good luck with them, having one 320GB and two 500GB models. I use them for my backup drives on three computers (two PCs and the Mac), plus I recommend them highly in my books. (Backup, folks!)<\/p>\n

Recently, I’ve been alerted to a problem with the drives: over-heating. The drives have plenty of ventilation in the form of holes on the case. Interestingly enough, the holes are dots and dashes and they actually spell out messages in Morse code. You can visit the MyBook Wikipedia page<\/a> to read what some of the messages say.<\/p>\n

Though they have plenty of ventilation, the drives get hot \u2014 especially in the summer months when your office temperature might climb into the high 70s or beyond. (That’s over 25\u00ba for you metric people.) When a hard drive gets too hot, it stops working. It also stops working in an unrecoverable manner. That’s bad.<\/p>\n

My advice: First, try to keep your office or computer room cool during the summer months. Avoid placing the external hard drive (and the computer as well) in direct sunlight.<\/p>\n

Second, when it gets too hot, turn the drive off. Disable the backup program that you’re running. And, if it’s really hot, turn off Mr. Computer as well. Computers don’t like heat and produce more errors when it’s hot. You can always compute later. In fact, during the summer months I often work only in the early morning and evening (my office lacks air conditioning).<\/p>\n

Finally, should an external drive go, don’t freak! It’s a backup drive. Get another MyBook and remember my first two bits of advice. I’ve seen the 500GB MyBooks on-sale for $130 at CostCo. That’s a deal!<\/p>\n

Having a backup drive is a good thing. Using it for backup is a better thing. Keep it cool is the best thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those external MyBook drives are hot! And I’m not describing how well they’re selling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}