I currently have an external hard drive in my posession. It went from the owner to another guy. That guy did something with it, then it went back to the owner. The owner then handed it to me to copy the data off of it. Knowing how sensitive external laptop drives are, I babied it all the way back to my computer. Plugged it in an guess what? ‘tick tick tick tick’ Not a good sign. I finally got it to recognize today and I am pulling everything off it right now. It is taking me a little time. Check out these readings from hdparm.

[blobaugh@yomotha ~]$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads:     2 MB in 52.41 seconds =  39.07 kB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:    2 MB in 16.37 seconds = 125.11 kB/sec

Yippee! I wish they could bottle that kind of speed!

I think I’ll die of old age before 103gigs of info copies off here!