So, my first generation Maxtor ‘One Touch’ (one touch with a hammer will fix this drive enclosure!) firewire external hard drive failed. The internal PATA 160gb hard drive failed and I, in my naive way, thought, “I should just replace the hard drive inside the enclosure so I can reduce the amount of crap that I throw into land fill”. The Maxtor ‘One Touch’ (one touch by an angry Cyclops is the best for the maxtor marketing department) enclosure was working fine,just the internal drive failed.
So, here I am looking at all the new fancy eSATA external drives with firewire 800 and bells and whistles and looking at the internal PATA drives thinking I can just get one of those and everything would be sweet. Wrong. (Fuck you Maxtor!) The complete fuckwits at Maxtor, most likely the marketing department, decided in their infinite wisdom of the industrial revolutions greatest perpetual motion machine, economic growth, that they would intentionally add something to their hard drive enclosures that would cripple my 500GB western digital PATA drive to 128GB.
This mindlessly stupid act is actually inside the electronics of the hard drive enclosure and not only restricts the drives representation to the computer as 128gb while in the maxtor one touch (one touch of a fusion reactor should fix this hard drive enclosure), actually writes to the PATA drive firmware itself to cripple the drive when it is inserted into another computer or hard drive case. Amazing! Incredible! what a wonderful thing to perpetuate on the world. Another Shit product to be thrown in the land fill. Ohh, I could make an exhibition at the local art gallery showing people, like the ones who work at Maxtor who decided to cripple an amazing accomplishment of engineers past, into the leechers that they are.
So, here I am with a 500GB Western Digital PATA 3.5″ Hard Drive that, when I remove it from its shackle’s in the Maxtor ‘One Touch’ (one touch from the depths of hell where the ingenuity of maxtors business unit employees arises, should work for this drive enclosure), it will be magically be reduced to 128GB which requires an ‘ucking PC to do low level magic on, to fix. I don’t have an ‘ucking PC, nor do I want one. Yes, that right, you can restore your hard drive to it’s un-maxtor spoilt previous capacity by runnin a piece of software called “HDAT2″ located at http://www.hdat2.com/ . It rewrites some ATA code on the drive itself to release the rest of your hard drive. Don’t what ever you do, put the drive back into the maxtor case!! It will fuck it again straight away. Maxtor, ohh Segate now, of couse do not even recognise this as a fault with their product and the only representation of this faulty product tries to tell you to replace your ATA controller? What the fuck! My ATA controller? It’s your controller that is fucked, the one you designed and installed into your hard drive enclosure!
This is one of the bast threads regarding the issue. http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?p=359325 . As usuall, the PC threads ramble on about crap and try to get you to replace you ATA controller? and up grade your BIOS? the fuck are you guys talking about again… you’ve missed the point entirely! Yes, some windows version are so crippled that they cant recognise more than 128GB and yes their are BIOSes that have some problem with their Large-BA (Large Bullshit Artists) but this problem has nothing to do with your own PC. It is squarely an engineering fuck-up.
Ohh well, lucky I have a brother who works in the IT industry. Gee no wonder we need all there people to work in IT industry! If we lived in a world that didn’t believe in perpetual motion machines; long live growth; we would probably have half of our population working in jobs that create meaning and love for humans! Fuck!
Today we celebrate! Two years ago on this day, the 31st of May, the Swedish police raided our facilities. They worked hard and long and tried stealing all of our servers, all of our backups and all of our admins. As usual, they did not succeed. After our opponents dropped their victory in their press releases we just got the site back online in no time. After three days the site was running almost like before – we could have been faster but we had to do alot of interviews and we had to drink some beer.
Today, even two years after the raid there is still not even a date set for the court case. We still haven’t got our servers back and the MPAA and their friends in Ifpi wants us to pay them 115.000.000 SEK (about 12.000.000 EUR). We want them to pay for our damages instead since what we do has never been illegal. To be frank, we’re not worried about the court case, we’re quite happy with it since it will prove our innocence.
In the meantime we have grown a bit. From 2.5 million peers at the time of the raid to 12 million peers. From 1 million registered users to 2.7 million. We used to be ranked just among the top 500 websites in the world – now we’re top 100. And when we write that _we_ are growing, we mean the community. It’s awesome to see the support the community show us. Even in our bad moments, we get your support. We’re really happy that you do this, every fan letter we get, every time someone say something nice to us, we really understand that we do something important, something that is more important than ourselves.
We haven’t done everything right. We’re amateurs in a lot of fields. But we’re experts in having fun and making a lot of file sharing happening. And we keep on improving on the areas we find our flaws. And you guys help us out. Thank you so much!
To celebrate today, we encourage you to keep on sharing. Keep on uploading, downloading, swapping bits of information. Let today be the pirates independence day! Today we celebrate the victories we’ve had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we’re united in our efforts. Keep on seeding!
