Friday, January 28, 2011

Acer Aspire Easystore D110 1TB


Bought the D110 1TB external hard drive for archival purposes. The disk drive itself was a Western Digital Drive but I was disappointed because the electronics in the otherwise solid enclosure were not robust enough to last more than one and a half years.
One day, after 18 months of use, there was no indicator light and I was unable to access the drive. The tell-tale smell of burnt / overheated components, suggested to me where the fault lay -- power supply failure. I swaped connection AC wires and adaper with compatible sets but with no success, so it had to be the components in the enclosure itself. I had no choice but to junk the enclosure and get a new one.

Opening up the casing was a challenge because there are no screws on the casing -- everything is tightly sealed. There are two possible places to attack when trying to get the case open. The back where the inputs are and the front where the indicator light is. The gap between the plastic front panel and the aluminum casing was a little wider than the one at the back panel, so I inserted a butter knife into this gap and pried the front panel off. It was not easy because there were hooks securing the thing to the body, but with a measure of strength and care, the front came out. I was then able to get the top of the casing off to expose the WD drive. A nudge and the drive was pushed out from the connectors and free.

Bought a new external case ZoomXtreme 3.5 Aluminum HDD enclosure which cost about SGD $69.00 and within 5 minutes I was able to access my disk once again.

I wish that Acer would do a better job with this and similar models of portable HDD.