When I returned from my business trip to Seattle, I was greeted by the most sickening of sounds to an IT professional – the horrific sound of grinding from a drive head crash.

A year ago, I picked up a LaCie Big Disk to house most of my digital media. The LaCie sports a FireWire 800 interface, and hardware disk spanning. The spanning doesn’t improve performance, but combines two 250GB disks into a single volume. The FireWire 800 is capable of moving more data than the original FireWire 400 or USB 2.0 interfaces.

Fortunately, I keep a backup of the disk on another drive – so data loss isn’t an issue. Simply the inconvenience of losing an asset.

I ended up repairing the big disk by replacing one of its two disks, which I’ll discuss in another post.

As for the reason it occurred, I believe it may have been the result of knocking the desk that the drive sits on. The drive was vertically oriented, which would make heads perpendicular to the motion of the desk. Chances are that a particularly bad bump caused the head to smash against the disk.

Here are some photos of the results, and a stark reminder of why you must BACK UP YOUR DATA!