I managed to dodge a bullet today.
One of the hard drives in my main desktop system has been ticking for several months now. The problem first appeared after I installed Windows 8, so I naturally assumed it had something to do with the new OS. My research into the matter seemed to confirm that, when I found a number of reports of drive ticking caused by overly aggressive head parking by Windows under some circumstances.
But none of the fixes that others used to solve their ticking problems worked in my case. So I did some more digging, and learned that the far more common reason for a drive to be ticking is that it’s about to die.
It would be particularly painful for this specific drive to die because it has all my documents on it, including multiple gigabytes of family photos and videos. And I **blush** don’t do backups as often or as thoroughly as I should.
Replacing the drive and cloning the data from the old one to the new one solved the problem. No more distracting ticking! More importantly, much less risk of losing precious data!
Repeat after me, ten times: “Post hoc ergo propter hoc“. Which is Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”. And is a very, very famous logical fallacy.
Which I often quote to others, and should have remembered myself in this instance.