And now I see the same story below mine posted yesterday, my bad. Can't post it enough though.

This is extremely relevant:

Reddit campaign to unseat Lamar Smith

...and replace him with who, another puppet? They're all lawyers, so the old saying old boss, same as the new boss. Yeah.

Okay, that made me spit out my mouth full of water.

True, although most IT departments and/or computer shops don't have a spare board for every make and model of HDD. We tried a few swaps at a shop I used to work at and it was successful I think one time, and that was pure luck that we had that exact PCB for that drive.

Haha, I was thinking the same shit while I was typing that. That and an older rap song about backing that ass up.

Yeah, best advice for any data storage:

BACKUP, then back that up... then back that up... then back that up offsite.

SpinRite is a good one, have used.

Edit: HDD Regen is more aimed at repair just fyi.

It's a joke. I've seen drives work fine for years with it showing imminent drive failure and I've seen drives die instantly with no warning given whatsoever.

There is no perfect tool that I could say, each drive manufacturer makes their own, and there are numerous third party tools out there as well. My best advice is have them all and have them handy. One I use quite a bit is HDD Regenerator, pretty thorough utility but it takes some time to run.

Perfectly said. I wish the mod points went higher than 5 for your post alone.

Damn, apparently I am new here haha. Been told that twice already, I'll just shut up now.

No, but I almost always see it on the firehose or something before I read it somewhere else.

I couldn't agree more, unfortunately they drove a lot of good businesses out of business with some of their marketing tactics and cheap product that small business couldn't compete with. Too bad this didn't happen ten years ago.