The primary hard drive in my main desktop was never what I’d call quiet. Of course, with as many as 10 fans running at any given moment my main desktop itself never has been exactly what I’d call quiet either. But the primary drive, from the day I installed it, sang out above the fans’ whoosh in a high-pitched whine that stood out above everything else. It was rather like the sound you can hear when a television is on somewhere in the house, or like the noise you used to hear walking into a large department store—presumably something to do with their security system.

It wasn’t a noise that I was worried about; it wasn’t the type of keening that warned of impending doom for the drive and its precious cargo. It was just a slightly noisier than usual drive. However it was that almost-inaudible-and-yet-not aspect that would ultimately become like Chinese water torture—or, to be perhaps more politically correct, a Britney Spears song.

So last Friday I decided that it would be a good day to play juggle the hard drives and get that old, noisy drive out of the equation entirely. To make a long story short, somewhere along the line the registry got corrupted and I could boot into Windows but not log in. After running through a raft of different restoration attempts I finally resigned myself to starting from scratch with a clean rebuild. It’d been more than a year since my last one and getting rid of useless cruft that had built up over time would be nice, anyway.

Things are mostly back to normal now, and tankfully that noisy drive is relegated to a removable drive sled where I only have to turn it on when I want to pull things off of it. Soon I’ll be able to shelve it entirely.