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4 months agoIt certainly could. That’s the gamble you’re taking.
I usually replace drives after 5 years if they are doing anything I consider important. So those drives to me would have 1-2 years left in them. Of course, I have seen a good number of drives I have repurposed to things less important still manage to rack up impressive numbers of hours.
With David Brin’s Uplift books, I’d just start with Startide Rising. It’s not so much a sequel to Sundiver, but another standalone book set in the same universe. There’s a couple of very minor references to Sundiver, but you’re not really missing anything if you haven’t read it going into Startide Rising.
While Startide Rising is fantastic and is probably one of my favorite sci-fi books, I found Sundiver just wasn’t that good. It’s not really bad per se, but it was David Brin’s first novel and that really shows and has some issues with pacing, an unreliable narrator, and things like that (IMHO). It’s also more of a mystery/detective novel set in space whereas Startide Rising is space opera, so the whole feel of the two books is very different and can just boil down to what sort of books you like.
I actually had read Startide Rising twice without even knowing Sundiver existed before looking it up online and realizing it was the second book in a series. I’ll probably pick up Startide Rising for another re-read sometime in the future, but for Sundiver once is probably enough.
The third book The Uplift War, is also quite good, and similar to the other two it’s more of another standalone book that’s set in the same universe, with some minor references to the previous two. I wasn’t as much of a fan of the last three books - they are a trilogy more than a standalone books, and you’d probably want to have read the previous three books before tackling them (or at the very least, Startide Rising) because things aren’t going to make a lot of sense if you just jump right in. I found them a long read and they got really weird at the end. Like Sundiver I’d say once is enough for books 4-6 too.