One of my 10,000 RPM WD Raptors broke a wing today... over 400 bad sectors, bad superblocks galore. It was only a matter of time. These two Raptors were old when I installed them in this machine back in 2013. The primary Raptor (with my Slackware main OS on it) seems to be healthy according to the tests I did on it today, but so did the secondary one just a few months ago. Poop happens.
I've got two matching WD 500Gs out back that are still new in the box and much more recent manufacture than these old Raptors were. I'll be installing them in the new Frankenputer I'll be putting together this winter. It's going to be based on a 6-core AMD processor with water-cooled block. I also have a brand new HP CD/DVD writer and some other stuff in the shop. This machine will have 16Gig RAM. I'll be doing a fresh install of Slack 14.2 on it once it's up and running.
I'm waiting till winter because it's just too miserably HOT to work out in my shop right now.

In the meantime, I burned all important backups to DVDs. That sure is a pain in the posterior, though. Rsync is the way to go! I'll set the new system up with mirrored rsync maintained drives like this one was till today.
So, now I'm looking forward to wintertime for the coolness and for this new project to get started.

Later...